Donald Trump’s disgraced former campaign manager has issued a stark warning to the president ahead of what promises to be a bruising battle for the Republicans in November.
Trump’s net approval rating is currently at 38 percent, with voters hitting him particularly hard on the economy, historically a bellwether ahead of midterms.
Those numbers have translated into an almost seven-point lead for Democrats, with many pundits suggesting Trump’s opponents stand a solid chance of retaking the House.
Steve Bannon, a convicted fraudster who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and served as chief strategist to the White House during the president’s first term, warned Thursday that GOP prospects may be even bleaker than they look right now if the party can’t get its messaging strategy together ahead of the polls.
“We’re going to lose the Senate in the fall anyway,” Bannon said on his War Room podcast. “The old way of putting a couple hundred million dollars into buying TV ads on Fox and CNN doesn’t work anymore. That’s old school—does not work. There’s been a new day, and the Senate’s gotta understand that, or otherwise we’ll lose the Senate.”
“There’s no enthusiasm for going door to door, having voter engagement, canvassing, to actually lead to victory,” he added.
The former strategist reiterated the same complaints about outreach in a later segment of his show. “It’s about voter engagement,” he said. “It’s not about raising tonnes of money from the donors who don’t owe you lock, stock and barrel, and doing these ridiculous ads on cable TV.”
“That day is over,” he warned. “We’re going to lose the Senate, and right now, it looks like you wanna lose the Senate.”
Bannon, who has convictions for both fraud related to Trump’s border wall project and for refusing to appear before a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riots, also claimed that Trump needs to stage a “showdown” with Senate leadership if the party is to have any hope of retaining the upper chamber.
“The Senate is treating… It’s worse than treating Trump as a lame duck, because even a lame duck, you have some respect for it,” he said. “Here, there’s no respect. The contempt is right below the surface.”
“Look, you either do it my way, or you’re gonna hit the highway,” he urged the president to tell ranking Republican senators. “We gotta have a forcing function here for a throwdown that leads to a showdown with Senate leadership, or we’re just gonna burn daylight through the election.”
Bannon’s ire appears to have been sparked by Senate Republicans torpedoing a key bill for the president over objections to his $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” refusing to advance it just hours before a scheduled vote.
Critics had slammed it as a bare-faced cash grab by the president on behalf of political allies, like Bannon, who claim to have been unjustly prosecuted by the Biden administration.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
