Steve Bannon Breaks With Trump Allies in Shocking Election Prediction

Steve Bannon isn’t predicting a blowout election result for Donald Trump—rather, he seems to have resigned himself to a painfully close presidential race.

During Monday’s episode of the War Room podcast, the former Trump strategist said that the margins in swing states would be “razor-thin at best.”

National polls do show an incredibly close race: FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates national polls, found Trump and Kamala Harris were in a dead heat Monday, with Harris leading Trump 48 percent to 46.9 percent, within the margin of error.

But Bannon’s willingness to deliver hard truths represents a notable shift for the mastermind behind the MAGA movement. Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Trump’s ex–national security adviser, once described Bannon as Trump’s “fawning court jester” during his first administration. Now, even Bannon has given up on padding the former president’s ego.

In an interview with Newsweek Monday, Bannon said that in 2016, he’d had “100 percent metaphysical certitude” Trump would win, Now, he was “close to 100 percent” certain Trump would win, if Republicans were able to “execute” their ground game on Election Day. Unfortunately for him, early voting has indicated that Trump’s ground game has been falling apart in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state.

Acknowledging the close race between Trump and Harris likely won’t change Bannon’s strategy for what the Republican presidential nominee should do on Tuesday night: Declare victory regardless before the election has been called.

Only days before the 2020 presidential election, Bannon said that Trump would announce himself as the winner regardless of how Americans had voted, according to leaked audio obtained by Mother Jones.

“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 said. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”

Trump was able to claim that the election had been stolen by seizing on early returns and voter perception that he’d been ahead. After being released from jail last month, Bannon urged Trump to do the exact same thing.

“If the votes come in like it looks like they’re gonna come in, he should step up and inform American citizens of exactly what’s going on and not keep people in the dark like was done in 2020,” Bannon said.

Bannon isn’t the only Trump ally whose unshakeable faith in their beloved leader has begun to falter. Susie Wiles, co-manager of Trump’s campaign, issued an internal memo Sunday filled with qualifying phrases like “should we be victorious,” “regardless of the outcome of the election,” and “God willing” seeming to acknowledge that Trump no longer had the election in the bag.

With less than 24 hours on the clock until Election Day, Donald Trump is attempting to sway undecided voters with an ad featuring a bright vision of America—except it has one fatal flaw: None of the images used are actually of America.

In a campaign flub that almost seems too basic to be true, the ad connects images and a narrative that are entirely unrelated, according to NBC News, which obtained the clip through a strategist that opposes Trump.

During a portion of the hit that claims that American “values were labeled shameful,” the advertisement features a still shot taken in Germany during 2012, according to Getty, which sells the image. Two more clips from the ad were taken from Thailand—a model in Thailand dressed as a construction worker appears with narration questioning if America can make a comeback. Then a voiceover tying the notion that Americans have effectively “surrendered” their paychecks runs alongside footage from a grocery store parking lot in Thailand recorded during 2020.

It’s not even the first time that Trump’s team has made this mistake. While attempting to capitalize on a late summer jobs report during the 2020 campaign season, Trump’s campaign featured stock footage from Italy and Ukraine while playing it off as images from the U.S.

Donald Trump’s most recent tariffs announcement reaffirms what we already knew: He’s just making things up as he goes along.

At a North Carolina campaign rally on Monday that covered everything from the Space Force to Van Jones’s tears, the former president took time to offer some new economic policy on Mexico.

“We’re being invaded by Mexico. But now they have a new president in Mexico … very, a very nice woman, they say, I haven’t met her. And I’m gonna inform her, on day one or sooner, that, if they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25 percent tariff on everything they send in to the United States of America.… You’re the first ones I’ve told it to, congratulations, North Carolina.”

Trump said the tariffs have a “100 percent chance of working” because if the 25 percent tariff doesn’t work, he’ll increase it to 50 percent, then 75 percent, and then 100 percent. 

This isn’t the first time Trump has proposed sprawling tariffs on imports, and it’s something that economists everywhere think is an incredibly foolish plan. Such a steep tariff hike would lead to absurd price increases on good working families everywhere, especially on avocados, beer, and alcohol—all significant imports from Mexico. Trump has heard this all before but shrugs it off because he believes that the tariffs will force companies to return to the U.S.

This is far from Trump’s most ridiculous take on tariffs. Just weeks ago he stated to Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait that he wanted “a 100, 200, 2,000 percent tariff” on imports. “The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States.”

But Mexico is America’s number one trading partner. And his latest proposal to increase tariffs whenever he feels like it reveals how little he understands about the impacts here.

This is a candidate that is so completely out of touch with reality that he would make goods incredibly expensive for the normal Americans he claims to care about just to strong-arm businesses into coming back here. Trump is flying blind, and we’re all stuck along for the ride.

Elon Musk has admitted that his $1 million daily giveaway isn’t really a lottery at all.

In Pennsylvania court on Monday, the lawyers for Musk and his America super PAC told Common Pleas Court Judge Angelo Foglietta that the prizes were not part of a giveaway or lottery, as “there is no prize to be won” and winners “are not chosen at random.”

Instead, attorney Chris Gober argued that the cash, which since early October was given each day to a registered voter in a battleground state who signed a pledge to uphold the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution, is a salary the recipients supposedly “earn” to be a spokesperson for the PAC. The recipients, registered to vote in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, aren’t chosen randomly but are picked based on their personal story and “suitability to serve,” according to Gober.

“The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance,” Gober said. “We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.”

In response, lawyers for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, who are suing Musk and the PAC for operating an illegal lottery in the Keystone State, argued that this was a “complete admission of liability,” especially since Musk said when he first announced the giveaway that the recipients would be chosen “randomly.” To make their point explicit, the lawyers for the district attorney’s office showed Musk’s statement to the judge. In response, Gober tried to make the argument that “randomly” and “by chance” are two different things, in his case that Musk’s giveaway is not an illegal lottery.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner took the witness stand himself, calling the giveaway a scam and asked for it to be shut down.

“This was all a political marketing masquerading as a lottery,” Krasner said. “That’s what it is. A grift.”

Musk’s lawyers said that they plan to stop the giveaway after the election Tuesday, and the PAC has pledged to give the recipients their money by November 30, according to evidence they presented in court. More than one million people have registered for the chance to win the cash prize, and Krasner in court questioned what Musk and the PAC will do with their personal data.

“They were scammed for their information,” Krasner said. “It has almost unlimited use.”

Two weeks ago, the Justice Department sent the PAC a warning letter stating that the lottery may violate federal laws against paying people to register to vote. For one day, the giveaway seemed to stop, only to resume the next day with two prizes awarded. Musk tried to have the Philadelphia lawsuit moved to federal court, but a federal judge rejected the request on Friday. Now, if the world’s richest man faces any consequences for giving away money for political purposes, it will come from a civil lawsuit in a Pennsylvania state court.

Alleged corruption at the highest rungs of Eric Adams’s administration in New York City has really brought down the reputation of the office, leaving some of the nation’s most legally embattled scoundrels thinking they have a legitimate shot at Gracie Mansion.

On Monday, disbarred attorney, unpaid ex–Donald Trump staffer, and disgraced politico Rudy Giuliani floated the idea that he could resume his position as Gotham’s mayor—23 years after he left the office.

When reached by the New York Post about a potential bid, Giuliani reportedly refused to outright reject the idea, telling the publication that he was “not going to say never, ever, ever.” But, as of right now, he’s not running for mayor.

It’s hard to imagine how Giuliani even has time to consider the costly and stressful endeavor of running for office—especially in a city that has openly denounced him for driving Trump’s election conspiracies.

Giuliani rose to prominence busting the mafia as a federal prosecutor, winning the mayoral race in 1993, and earning the moniker “America’s Mayor” for his stewardship through the 9/11 attacks. But Giuliani’s decision to serve at Trump’s side has lost him practically every merit in the years since.

Giuliani was ordered in December to pay nearly $150 million in damages to mother-daughter duo Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a pair of 2020 Georgia poll workers whom he had repeatedly defamed, before being court-ordered to hand over his Manhattan penthouse to the duo in October after failing to pay up.

Between then, the former Trump attorney unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy, lost his accountant over his insurmountable debts, begged Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees (he refused), had his WABC radio show canceled for spewing 2020 election lies, and miserably started his own coffee brand, “Rudy Coffee,” in an effort to funnel in some extra cash. He ultimately lost his bankruptcy case due to his outlandish spending habits, with the presiding New York judge branding the former city mayor a “recalcitrant debtor.”

Giuliani is also under the gun for a lawsuit from his former legal representation, who accused him of failing to pay his bill and allegedly only dishing out $214,000 of nearly $1.6 million in legal expenses. Giuliani, meanwhile, claimed he was stiffed by his favorite client, Trump, to the tune of millions of dollars.

Amazingly, Giuliani’s legal troubles don’t end there: The MAGA henchman is also one of 19 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case and was named in April in an Arizona indictment charging another slew of Republican officials and Trump allies for their alleged involvement in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results. In October, an Arizona judge torched a legal filing Giuliani made in the case, ruling that the ex–Trump aide had “not one scintilla” of evidence to question the legitimacy of a grand jury assigned to his lawsuit.

Still, Giuliani legitimately believes he has a shot. Citing Adams’s indictment and allegedly far-left candidates, the 80-year-old politico insisted the idea wasn’t far-flung.

“Everyone running for mayor looks like they’re from Red China. They don’t look American,” Giuliani told the Post. “I’m concerned about the city becoming a Democratic dictatorship.”

The twice-indicted politico then insisted that it would be Democrats—not Republicans—who steer corruption into City Hall.

“The only time since Fiorello LaGuardia a century ago that city government was honest was under me and Mike Bloomberg,” he said. “If you don’t have a Republican or independent mayor, you will have corruption at City Hall.”

Donald Trump’s allies are “completely exasperated” after the candidate’s wildly disturbing speech over the weekend in a key battleground state.

During Trump’s Sunday address in Lititz, Pennsylvania, the former president said that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after being voted out of office in 2020, and said that he “wouldn’t mind” if members of the press took a bullet meant for him. Both represent significant escalations in Trump’s explicit election denialism and violent threats.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported later that day that Trump’s allies are fed up with their candidate’s use of extreme rhetoric in a crucial state.

“I spoke to a number of allies who were completely exasperated after that Pennsylvania rally,” Holmes said. “We cannot talk about how critical Pennsylvania is as a state. There are many people inside of Trump’s inner circle who believe that Pennsylvania will decide the election.”

“One of these allies telling me, ‘How hard is it to just go up there and say, Kamala broke it and I’m going to fix it?’” Holmes said. “Another one telling me that they have spent an enormous amount of time talking to campaign advisers, trying to get Donald Trump to focus on the economy, to focus on inflation. They believe these are the matters that voters actually care about.”

“These allies are incredibly frustrated about the language that he is using on the campaign trail. The darkness of the rhetoric, at least how they see it, they believe that he can win this election, but he’s going to have to actually change how he is talking,” she continued.

Trump’s latest remarks come after other disturbing escalations, including threatening to turn the U.S. military on its own citizens. Last week, he doubled down on attacks against Liz Cheney, a Kamala Harris ally, after he suggested the former representative ought to be put in front of a firing squad.

A panel led by CNN’s Erin Burnett unpacked the concerns of Trump’s top allies, highlighting just how weird and gruesome the former president’s rhetoric has become. Jonah Goldberg, a political commentator, said that the problem with Trump was that he always managed to “unload with craziness, and that’s what gets covered.”

Lulu Garcia-Navarro, an opinion podcast host for The New York Times, said that Trump’s remarks about the press were “not normal” and “not right.”

“Everything that [Trump] has done has sabotaged his campaign. I don’t know a single person, even people who like Donald Trump, even people who support Donald Trump, who think this is a winning message,” said Garcia-Navarro.

Shermichael Singleton, a conservative political commentator, said that he’d spoken to multiple Trump supporters who agreed.

“I called a bunch of folks that I know, who are Trump supporters, some just regular people, some who are doing grassroots stuff in critical states,” Singleton said. “And every last one of them said, ‘What in the hell is the president doing?’”

“These are people who love Donald Trump and respect Donald Trump,” Singleton explained. “I’m hearing them say, ‘It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to win.’”

Trump’s allies’ panic comes after early voting numbers suggested that the former president could be in trouble in Pennsylvania, a state that is critical to ensuring his victory. Last week, more than 100,000 new voters, a majority of whom were women, had already cast their ballots in Pennsylvania ahead of Election Day.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party in Scranton, Pennsylvania, appeared to be a lot more focused Saturday on signing up poll watchers than signing up voters, according to The Washington Post.

Far-right groups that rioted through the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, are readying themselves for the aftermath of Election Day.

Local chapters of the Proud Boys are congregating on Telegram, a popular anonymous messaging app that played a key role in organizing the insurrection, to prepare a response to what they believe is widespread voter fraud in the 2024 race. In closed chats, users that affiliate themselves with the neofascist, white supremacist–adjacent group are sharing telling and suggestive images, including photos of armed men and guns, while suggesting that they’re ready to revolt unless Donald Trump wins.

“The day is fast approaching when fence sitting will no longer be possible,” read one post from an Ohio chapter of the Proud Boys, according to a New York Times analysis of one million messages across several dozen Telegram channels with more than 500,000 collective members. “You will either stand with the resistance or take a knee and willingly accept the yoke of tyranny and oppression.”

Other users in the Ohio chapter warned that the nonviolent, antifascist political movement antifa will riot “once Trump wins,” telling its members to “prepare accordingly,” reported The Wall Street Journal.

“While other platforms are primarily about self-expression, ‘owning the libs’ and hateful buffoonery, Telegram often generates an ambience of ‘let’s get something done,’” Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, told the Times.

The Telegram chat of a Texas chapter of the decentralized paramilitary group recently shared a post claiming that it was Vice President Kamala Harris—and not Trump—who planned to leverage allegations of “millions of fake ballots” to retake the White House.

One commenter with a Proud Boys flag in the background of their profile picture replied: “So we can shoot them then, right?”

But Telegram isn’t the only place that the group is spreading the plan, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. A North Phoenix chapter of the group posted pictures of a gun arsenal on Trump’s platform Truth Social last month, writing that the “Proud Boys stocking up getting ready for Nov.… It’s going to be biggley!!”

Many of the groups calling people to action are labeling themselves as “election integrity” networks. But in reality, they are spreading false or misleading information about the vote that could disrupt the election, including encouraging members to grill local officials in person about absentee ballot tallies or elevating claims that election workers are giving Republican voters writing tools for their ballots that won’t be compatible with voting machines to undermine the results.

Trump has tacitly embraced the Proud Boys’ support, infamously telling the group to “stand back and stand by” when asked during his September 2020 presidential debate against Joe Biden to condemn the white supremacists.

During a political rally in Aston, Pennsylvania, Sunday, JD Vance told quite a whopper about Donald Trump: that the Republican presidential nominee doesn’t believe in censorship and would not suppress Americans’ free speech.

“You know something Donald Trump will never do? Donald Trump will never go out there and say that his fellow citizens should be censored or silenced for disagreeing with them,” Vance said to cheers from the pro-MAGA crowd.

Vance said this about a man who has threatened multiple media outlets in the last month alone, whether it was filing an FEC complaint against The Washington Post, suing CBS for $10 million over an interview of Kamala Harris, or calling for ABC’s broadcast license to be revoked because he thought his debate with Harris on the network was rigged.

Trump has even bragged that his attacks have undermined the credibility of where much of his criticism comes from: the news media. Naturally, Vance’s words elicited incredulous reactions on social media.

It’s not just the media. Trump has also named his political opponents part of the “enemy within” and has threatened to unleash the military against them. Previously, Vance seemed to be earning his keep as Trump’s running mate by attempting to sanitize and explain away the former president’s rhetoric, calling Trump’s threats “unfiltered” and “from the heart.” It seems that the Ohio senator has graduated to out-and-out lying about what Trump actually stands for.

Herschel Walker is back and ready to lead our country’s missile defense system.

That is not some cruel joke, but a very real thing Donald Trump proposed at his Georgia rally on Sunday—minutes after Walker confused Trump with his eldest son while encouraging people to go out and vote

“We will build a missile defense shield, all made in the USA—wrapped around our country to defend ourselves and our country. It’s all gonna be made in the United States, and a lot of it in your great state. We’ll put Herschel Walker in charge of that little sucker.” 

Walker, a devoted Trump acolyte, is one of the most famous Black men in Georgia. The college football legend was thrust into the national political eye when he ran against and lost to Democrat Raphael Warnock in the heated 2022 Senate race.

That campaign was plagued by countless gaffes and scandals of Walker’s own creation. He lambasted absent Black fathers while lying to his campaign about being one himself. He criticized abortion rights, even as it was revealed he paid for his girlfriend’s abortion. He lied about his college degree, where he lived, a charity he claimed to have founded, and so much more. As a Black Republican, he denied racism even existed, as he told a crowd of (mostly) white voters that “we use Black power to create white guilt.… Reparations teaches separation.”

On Sunday, Walker kept the gaffes going, as he ended his speech by telling rallygoers to “get to the polls and vote for my friend, and your friend, Donald Trump Jr.” Walker awkwardly tried to correct himself afterward, speaking back into the microphone. “Donald Trump—Donald J. Trump.”

“Bringing back Herschel Walker is the kind of shit I would do if I were trying to lose an election but what do I know,” journalist Louis Peitzman said on X.

Walker is a walking faux pas, and will continue to be so in a nightmare scenario where he leads missile defense. We can only hope that Georgians heard him the first time and decide to write in Donald Trump Jr. on Election Day.   

MAGA Republicans are demanding equal time for Donald Trump after Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live over the weekend, even though the former president already received equal airtime within a day of her appearance.

Federal Communications Commissioner Brandon Carr, a Trump appointee, raised the alarm Saturday about Harris’s surprise appearance after it was announced just hours before the show aired. In a post on X, Carr wrote that Harris’s cameo was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.”

“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct—a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election,” he wrote. “Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns.”

When Trump hosted SNL in 2015, his appearance triggered the Equal Time rule, and NBC offered Trump’s opponents 12 minutes of free air time on NBC affiliate stations.

Trump was offered the same deal after Harris’s appearance. On Sunday afternoon, the Republican presidential nominee aired a short 60-second message after the end of a NASCAR race, according to CNN. Harris had been given around 30 seconds “without charge,” according to the FCC filing.

That certainly didn’t satisfy grievance-fueled MAGA acolytes, who seem to think Trump is somehow entitled to a booking on SNL.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio complained Sunday that her appearance was part of a “full-scale assault” to “depress and suppress Republican votes” and that it had happened “in violation of the law.”

“I hope she laughed on Saturday Night Live, in front of millions of people who heard her laughing for a few minutes, cause that’s probably worth two to three million votes right there,” he sneered.

During an appearance Monday on Fox News’s Mornings With Maria, Carr claimed that the FCC might consider “license revocation” as a possible remedy if they find Harris’s appearance to be “egregious.”

“The whole purpose of this rule is to give people a fair shot,” Carr said, not acknowledging that Trump had already been given equal time.

Elon Musk also boosted allegations Sunday that Harris’s appearance was illegal (it wasn’t), alongside claims that SNL had committed election inference because it “did a skit *literally* aimed at boosting the name recognition” of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.

The post implied that Kaine’s race was tightening against Republican candidate Hung Cao, after one single poll found Kaine’s 9–14 point lead shrank to only two points. It’s not illegal, however, for a political candidate to appear on a television show.