Ex-White House strategist Steve Bannon has predicted that “President Trump is going to prison” if Democrats win back the White House in 2028.
The “War Room” host worried aloud about the prospect of Republicans losing the next presidential election — with one pending criminal indictment still technically hanging over Trump’s head — during a Thursday appearance on the channel Real America’s Voice.
“God forbid, we don’t win in ’28, President Trump is going to prison,” Bannon warned. “People are sitting around — still with the glow of Nov. 4 and all the inaugurations and all the balls.”
“We’re at war,” he added, “and things that’ve happened in the last 72 hours, if you don’t understand we’re in political warfare, you’re not awake.”
Bannon, 71, served four months in federal prison last year for refusing to testify to the House select committee that investigated the 45th president over the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
The four criminal indictments against Trump effectively wound down before his term — including a federal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith alleging he sought to overturn the 2020 election results, which culminated in the breach of the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters.
Smith also charged the president with unlawfully keeping national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving the White House in January 2021.
The FBI raided the Palm Beach, Fla., residence in August 2022 and recovered more than 100 sensitive government files.
Smith dropped both the classified documents and 2020 election cases in January — but claimed “the admissible evidence” in the latter “was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”
“The department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind,” Smith wrote in a 174-page report released six days before Trump assumed office Jan. 20.
South Florida US District Judge Aileen Cannon blocked the publication of a second report on the improper hoarding of the national security files after dismissing the indictment due to Smith’s appointment without a vote of Congress.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was disqualified from her own election interference case against Trump in Georgia due to an improper romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.
In January, a Georgia appeals court upheld a district court judge’s decision to throw Willis off the case and dropped three of Trump’s charges.
But the overall indictment against the president and several of his co-defendants still remains in limbo.
Manhattan judge Juan Merchan also slapped Trump with a no-penalty sentence a little more than a week before he returned to the White House following a conviction last year on 34 counts of business fraud related to “hush money” payments made to the porn star Stormy Daniels to conceal a decade-old affair.
That verdict is currently under appeal.
Since assuming office, Trump and his officials have also been hit with a slew of lawsuits over executive actions, ranging from the firing of federal employees to a highly controversial decision to fly purported Venezuelan migrant gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador.
That case earned Trump a rare rebuke, albeit indirectly, from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after the president called for the impeachment of the jurist blocking the flights, Chief DC US District Judge James Boasberg.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said March 18. “The normal appellate review process exists for that reason.”
Bannon never referred directly to any of the pending suits or past criminal cases in his appearance — but suggested that Democrats could move sooner and try to kick Trump out of office if they win a majority in the House in the 2026 election.
“We are kidding ourselves if we don’t think that Democrats are pulling all stops out to stop President Trump,” he said, “to take the House through any means necessary, to impeach Trump.”
