Steve Bannon predicted that President Donald Trump would run for the White House again in 2024 if he loses to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in November. Bannon served as Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor in his administration’s early days and worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign. In August, Bannon was arrested on fraud charges related to the We Build the Wall campaign and will stand trial next year. He is also involved in the alleged leak of Hunter Biden‘s hard drive to the New York Post.
In an interview with The Australian, Bannon suggested the polls are “closer than is being reported” and believes Trump will win on Nov. 3. “I’ll make this prediction right now: if for any reason the election is stolen from or in some sort of way Joe Biden is declared the winner, Trump will announce he’s going to run for re-election in 2024,” Bannon said, via the Daily Mail. Bannon predicted the election would not be “settled anytime soon” and could go to the Supreme Court or the House of Representatives.
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These comments contradict Bannon’s own speech before the Young Republican Federation just days earlier, when he said Trump would be able to declare himself the winner by 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. on election night. “The elites are traumatized. They do not want to go stand in line and vote,” Bannon claimed. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is a game-changer. It [the decisive factor] is what electorate shows up to vote on a vote that can be certified. That’s a vote that counts. And right now, what they [Trump critics] don’t want to talk about, is Donald J. Trump leads on people who are actually going to show up and vote on November 3, by 21%.”
Bannon is also involved in the situation with Hunter Biden’s emails. Last week, the Post published emails reporting that Rudy Giuliani obtained Hunter’s hard drive after Hunter left a laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop and never picked it up. The Post claimed the emails showed Hunter tried to set up a meeting between his father and a Ukrainian power company executive when Biden was vice president. However, the Biden campaign said no meeting was ever scheduled. Weeks before the Post published the report, though, a network run by Bannon’s business partner Guo Wengui was hyping up the hard drive’s contents, reports the Daily Beast. Bannon himself hyped up the hard drive during a Dutch interview in September, although the Dutch reporter did not share the clip until Friday. On Saturday, sources told USA Today the situation has led to an FBI investigation into the material being part of a disinformation campaign promoted by Russia.
In August, Bannon and three others were charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud, and money laundering connected to We Build The Wall, a private campaign to raise money for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Bannon, who was arrested on Wengui’s yacht, pleaded not guilty. The trial will start in 2021.
