Mother Jones has leaked audio showing that on October 31, 2020, days before te election, Trump advisor Steve Bannon “told a group of associates that President Donald Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night — even if he was losing.” Leaked Audio: Before Election Day, Bannon Said Trump Planned to Falsely Claim Victory:
On the evening of October 31, 2020, Steve Bannon told a group of associates that President Donald Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night—even if he was losing. Trump knew that the slow counting of Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots meant the returns would show early leads for him in key states. His “strategy” was to use this fact to assert that he had won, while claiming that the inevitable shifts in vote totals toward Joe Biden must be the result of fraud, Bannon explained.
“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon, laughing, told the group, according to audio of the meeting obtained by Mother Jones. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
“As it sits here today,” Bannon said later in the conversation, describing a scenario in which Trump held an early lead in key swing states, “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that.’”
Trump’s plan to falsely declare victory while tens of millions of votes were still being counted was public knowledge even before the election. Axios reported on the scheme at the time. Bannon himself discussed the idea on November 3—Election Day—on his War Room podcast. Weeks earlier, Bannon had interviewed a former Trump administration official who outlined how Trump would use allegations of fraud to dispute an electoral defeat and would seek to have Congress declare him the winner. Last month, the congressional committee investigating January 6 detailed how Rudy Giuliani convinced Trump to go ahead with a victory declaration after 2 a.m. on November 4, over the objections of campaign staff. “Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump insisted in that infamous news conference.
The nearly hourlong audio obtained by Mother Jones is new evidence that Trump’s late-night diatribe—which came a few hours later than Bannon had anticipated—followed a preexisting plan to lie to Americans about the election results in a bid to hold onto power. The new recording stands out for the striking candor and detail with which Bannon described a scheme to use lies to subvert democracy. Bannon also predicted that Trump’s false declaration of victory would lead to widespread political violence, along with “crazy” efforts by Trump to stay in office. Bannon and his associates laughed about those scenarios at various points in the recording.
[T]he pre-election audio comes from a meeting between Bannon and a half dozen supporters of Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese mogul for whom Bannon has worked. Bannon helped Guo launch a series of pro-Trump Chinese-language news websites that have promoted an array of far-right misinformation, including a video streaming site called GTV. The meeting was intended to help GTV plan its election night coverage.
Though he did not attend, Guo arranged the confab, which was held in the Washington, DC, townhouse where Bannon tapes War Room, according to a person who was present. That source recorded the meeting and recently provided the audio to Mother Jones. The attendees included Dr. Li Meng Yan, a virologist who had made unsubstantiated claims that Covid was designed by China as a bioweapon—claims that Bannon had helped to propagate. Also there was Wang Dinggang, a GTV host who had helped to spread false claims about Hunter Biden.
Speaking to this group of mostly Chinese immigrants, Bannon explained US electoral processes—and Trump’s plans to exploit them—in some detail. He emphasized that in 2020, Republicans were more likely to vote in person, casting ballots that, in many states, would be counted first. Democrats disproportionately voted by mail. Their ballots would take days to tally in a number of states. That meant that when it came to public perceptions about who was winning, Democrats would “have a natural disadvantage,” Bannon said. “And Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.”
Nonpartisan researchers call it the “blue shift.” Democratic groups say it’s a “red mirage.” No matter the label, there’s a very real phenomenon where Democratic candidates often gain votes as mail-in ballots get counted after Election Day.
“So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm,” Bannon continued. “You’re going to have antifa, crazy. The media, crazy. The courts are crazy. And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking, tweeting shit out: ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.’”
It’s not clear how much influence Bannon, who had previously been Trump’s top White House strategist before being ousted, really wielded over Trump at this time. But Bannon has suggested that he was a key architect of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results and has reportedly asserted that he convincedTrump to make January 6 a moment of reckoning in that bid. Bannon was also among the Trump associates who gathered in a set of rooms and suites in the Willard Hotel on January 6 to advise on the president’s attempt to remain in power.
Bannon’s remarks to Guo’s supporters indicate that he was working with a group, led by Giuliani, that wanted Trump to take particularly aggressive steps to contest unfavorable election results. Other advisers have said they opposed these steps. Bannon said during the October 31 meeting that he was collaborating closely with Giuliani, who was preparing to oversee Trump’s planned legal efforts.
[As] a result, any chance for a “peaceful resolution of this is probably gone,” Bannon said. “Because the other three alternatives [are], either Biden’s up slightly and Trump says he stole it, right, and he’s not leaving. Or it’s undefined and we can’t figure out who’s leading, and Trump’s saying he’s stealing it, and he’s not leaving. Or, Trump’s leading, which is the one where they’re gonna burn the city down.”
[Bannon] said that Trump falsely claiming he’d won—a strategy Bannon was cheering on—would probably cause violence. And Bannon emphasized that election night would mark the start of a battle for power in which Trump would try to stop the votes of people who opposed him from being counted, while Democrats would try to use invalid ballots to defeat him. Democrats, Bannon claimed, “steal elections all the time.”
Election Day 2020 would not be like others, Bannon said. “This is a revolution,” he explained. “This election just triggers more fighting.”
Bannon also said during this meeting that once the voting was done, Trump would be unencumbered by electoral pressure. “Here’s the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again,” Bannon said. “He’s gonna fire [Christopher] Wray, the FBI director…He’s gonna say ‘Fuck you. How about that?’ Because…he’s done his last election. Oh, he’s going to be off the chain—he’s gonna be crazy.”
Bannon also said he expected that Trump would quickly fire CIA Director Gina Haspel, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s going to be even crazier. No, because he’s gonna sit right there and say, ‘They stole it. I’m directing the attorney general to shut down all ballot places in all 50 states,’” Bannon said. “He’s not going out easy. If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.”
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post explains The significance of the new Steve Bannon tape:
[T]there is little question that Bannon could be a significant witness. That was confirmed by a new piece of evidence that landed even as the Jan. 6 committee was holding a hearing Tuesday.
[To] be clear, this is hardly the first indication that Trump’s false victory declaration was preplanned, nor is it news that Bannon was predicting as much. A day after these taped comments, Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported that Trump had told advisers that he would declare victory if it looked like he was ahead at the time — even if the outcome wasn’t final. And even as voters were voting on Election Day, Bannon on his podcast publicly echoed his private prediction that Trump would claim victory between 10 and 11 p.m.
But what the new comments add to the record is what Bannon might have viewed as the ends. And just as his prescience about Trump’s premature victory declaration and about “all hell” breaking loose on Jan. 6 invite all kinds of questions about just what he knew about Trump’s plans, so too does how he described the potential impact of Trump declaring victory.
On the tape, Bannon acknowledged something emphasized in the Axios story and elsewhere: that it was quite possible that Trump would be ahead on election night because his voters were more likely to vote in person, and more Democratic-heavy mail ballots are often counted later — something dubbed the “red mirage.” He came out and admitted that Trump would seek to exploit this misleading setup.
“More of our people vote early, that count; theirs vote in mail,” Bannon said. “And so they’re going to have a natural disadvantage. And Trump’s going to take advantage of that. That’s our strategy. He’s going to declare himself a winner.”
Bannon then predicted with apparent glee that this would set off a “firestorm.”
“We’re going to have antifa crazy, the media crazy, the courts are crazy,” he said. “And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking, tweeting s— out. ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.’ ”
Bannon added: “Also, if Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s gonna be even crazier.”
Bannon doesn’t come out and describe the utility of this “firestorm” in the comments reported by Mother Jones. What purpose could be served by inflaming antifa and the media, besides stoking grievances that have proven politically useful to Trump? Perhaps Bannon just reveled in the idea of owning the libs.
But there are other, earlier Bannon comments that suggest that perhaps he saw some real, electoral utility in manufacturing such a “firestorm” — and that he had an eye for January 2021 all along.
In an interview with Showtime’s “The Circus” released in early October — about a month before these other comments — Bannon predicted that there would be such uncertainty that Congress would be forced to decide the election. Bannon couched it in terms of Democrats supposedly seeking to overturn the election by counting mail ballots that he described as “uncertified,” but even that framing suggested that this supposed uncertainty could well be manufactured. And the practical effect was him predicting a situation much like the one Trump would ultimately gun for on Jan. 6.
He even used the same word: “firestorm.”
“It’s gonna be crazy lawsuits on naked ballots, on every different aspect of it,” Bannon said, adding: “With this scale of votes, we’ll go into January, and that’s when the firestorm starts.”
Host John Heilemann pressed him on what seemed like a crazy idea at the time. Was Bannon really saying this would be decided by Congress two months after the election?
Bannon predicted: “Right before noon on [January] 20th, in a vote in the House, Trump will win the presidency.”
Note: if Republicans had won the House and Senate, they would have had the votes to overturn an election in which Joe Biden won by the popular vote by more than 7 million votes. American democracy would have died that day. We would be living under an authoritarian GQP autocracy today. Think about that when you vote this year.
It didn’t get past the night of Jan. 6, but only because Vice President Mike Pence and enough Republicans snuffed out the idea. Trump and Co. weren’t able to create enough smoke to convince enough Republicans to go along with their desperate gambit.
Bannon’s theorizing didn’t come out of nowhere. A few days earlier on his show, a former Trump White House official had talked about just such a scenario. The following day, Trump himself talked about the advantage he could have if it ever went to Congress, by virtue of there being more GOP-controlled congressional delegations than Democratic ones. Trump said, “We have an advantage if we go back to Congress. Does everyone understand that? I think it’s 26 to 22 or something, because it’s counted one vote per state.”
(The House would award one vote per delegation in such a scenario. And at the time, Republicans had majorities of 26 delegations to Democrats’ 22 — though that was subject to change in the 2020 election.)
So in total, Bannon predicted Trump’s premature victory declaration, which came true. He predicted that all hell would break loose on Jan. 6, which came true. He predicted that uncertainty about election results spurred by a bunch of lawsuits would force Congress to decide the election, which wound up essentially being Trump’s plan. And he suggested that unrest was perhaps desirable and/or could be of some utility in all of this, which evidence suggests Trump might well have agreed with on Jan. 6.
We don’t know just how much coordination there was between Trump and Bannon, though the Jan. 6 committee noted Tuesday that the two men spoke at least twice Jan. 5, including before Bannon’s prediction about Jan. 6. It’s certainly possible Bannon was engaging in guesswork. But it also seems possible that he was privy to some of the strategizing about what was to come.
The Jan. 6 committee has focused on proving that Trump was repeatedly told his wild voter-fraud claims were false, in the service of proving he acted corruptly in seeking to overturn the election. What Bannon was saying publicly was that Trump was going to do all of this regardless of the actual results, which suggests that indeed the details really didn’t matter to Trump. If that stemmed from talks with Trump and his team, that would drive home the corruptness.
Whether Bannon testifies or not, that’s a significant piece of the puzzle.
Steve Bannon goes on trial on Monday. It is an open and shut case of obstruction of Congress. It is doubtful that Bannon will take the stand at his trial. The Judge will not let him use his courtroom for an episode of his War Room podcast. He failed to produce the documents requested and failed to appear for his deposition. That is the only relevant issue. His attorney has already conceded Bannon has no defenses. He shoud cop a plea. But Bannon may be willing to keep his secrets and serve time for his “Dear Leader.”
By the end of next week, this insurrectionist piece of shit may be convicted at trial and can be sentenced up to 2 years in prison. There will be no pardon this time. Good riddance.