Trump will declare a ‘national emergency’ before midterms: Bannon

July 25, 2026 — 5:00am

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Steve Bannon, the barnstorming godfather of the MAGA movement, follows Australian affairs more closely than almost any other American politico.

He has some surprising praise for Anthony Albanese and some awkward advice for Pauline Hanson. But his confident prediction of America’s near future is shocking.

Donald Trump’s campaign strategist for his 2016 election win says: “I believe we will have a national emergency declared by late August,” ahead of the Congressional midterm elections due on November 3. “You will have enough evidence by mid-August to show that we have a massive problem” of election fraud, he tells me in an interview. Trump’s televised address to the nation on Thursday last week was the beginning of the process, he says.

The president declassified documents, which he claimed show “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” revealed by the 2020 election.

These had been hidden, even from him, by a “deep state” conspiracy of US intelligence services, he posited.

Trump demanded that the Congress pass a bill called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act. The bill stipulates that all voters produce a passport or birth certificate to be eligible to vote. Democrats denounce it as an effort at mass disenfranchisement. The Brennan Centre for Justice at New York University estimates that it could block 21 million Americans from the ballot box.

Under the US Constitution, it’s the states, not the federal government, that run elections. The SAVE Act would force state governments to hand voter roll information to Washington.

Trump sent his Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, out the following morning to issue a threat to state officials: they could face prison time unless they followed the administration’s orders to remove non-citizens from rolls.

But Bannon tells me that he doesn’t think there’s time to pass the bill. “There will be more Thursdays. You have to lay the predicate first.” The administration would find more evidence of fraud, he predicted. “They will find more things.

“We cannot have another stolen election,” he said, a reference to Trump’s fiction that Joe Biden won by fraud in 2020. Almost one in three Americans believes him.

“We are facing a national security emergency, and we will need real teeth to deal with it,” Bannon says. “You put ICE agents around polling booths to stop illegal immigrants from voting or any playing with voting machines. Maybe the National Guard; we need to clean up mail-in ballots.” Trump wants them outlawed, even though 29 per cent of Americans used mail-in ballots to vote in 2024.

Could Bannon’s vision actually materialise? “Yes,” says........

© Brisbane Times