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.Bannon said this while meeting with some allies of a shady Chinese media mogul he works with. (Mother Jones obtained audio of the meeting.)
The 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....When Bannon said that Trump would claim victory prematurely, he wasn't revealing insider knowledge -- Trump's plan to do that had been reported by Axios. Bannon was right about that, but he got several things wrong, primarily because, like most right-wingers, he doesn't understand how people to the left of him think, and because he seemed to believe that everyone in America was as much in awe of Trump as Trump's right-wing superfans were.
“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.”Bannon didn't just claim that Trump would declare victory -- he said that Trump would dare the country to deprive him of a win. He implied that we would all be cowed by this, or at least Trump thought we would be. He was Donald Trump! He was the president! If he said he won, that would be the last word on the subject!
“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.'”
In reality, states and localities counted the votes, the news media reported the count, and the consensus story of the vote count largely ignored Trump's chest-thumping. It sounds as if Bannon genuinely believed that wouldn't happen.
More:
Bannon explained ... 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.”It seems to have never occurred to Bannon that the majority of us would simply treat Trump's boasts as empty noise -- something we'd been doing for four years. It also never occurred to him that left-leaning anarchists don't particularly like the Democratic Party and would never have rioted on Joe Biden's behalf. Or maybe Antifa also grasped that Trump could blather all he wanted, but he was still in the process of losing the election.
“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.'”
... 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.”Nobody on the left burned anything. Trump might have thought he could simply assert that he was a winner and have it be true, and Bannon might have assumed the same thing, but everyone outside the Trump bubble just shrugged that off. Yes, even Antifa.
Mother Jones has obtained NEW revelations about Steve Bannon:
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 12, 2022
Leaked audio shows the former White House strategist detailing Trump’s plan to declare election victory, even if he was losing. Listen: pic.twitter.com/ARr3M4qAjH
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