Former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, issued a desperate warning to his ultraconservative followers, declaring that their movement is facing a criminal reckoning.

“As God is my witness, if we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison, myself included,” Bannon said at a Conservative Partnership Institute event on Nov. 6.

Steven Bannon, former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, speaking at the Conservative Partnership Academy on Nov. 6, 2025. (Photos: Steve Bannon’s War Room X post, The Economist video screenshot)

Bannon’s Call for ‘More Intense Action’

Bannon’s dire warning came in the immediate wake of sweeping Democratic victories in gubernatorial and local races across states like New York, New Jersey, and Virginia.

The recent defeats reflect a steadily sliding public opinion for Trump-led initiatives. New polls indicated that around four in ten voters cited their opposition to Trump as a major factor in the recent gubernatorial races, while an Emerson College poll showed Trump’s approval rating sitting at 41%, an eight-point drop since he took office.

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Bannon, who in February pled guilty to a fraud scheme in which he stole $1 million from a crowd-funded charity to build a wall along the U.S. southern border, said Republicans must “counter” Democrats to avoid more losses in future elections.

“They’re not gonna stop. They are getting more and more and more radical,” Bannon said at the gathering of conservatives.

“We have to counter it with more action, more intense action, more urgency,” he added. “We’re burning daylight. We have to codify what President Trump has done by executive order. We’ve gotta put aside these structural barriers and get on with it.”

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress assert that Trump is actively destroying the rule of law he claims to be restoring, citing illegal actions like firing federal prosecutors, dismantling federal agencies, and seizing congressionally appropriated funds.

Bannon also urged conservatives to sue California to block the majority Democrat state’s overwhelmingly approved redistricting measure championed by Trump foe Gov. Gavin Newsom, a measure intended to neutralize recent Republican gerrymandering of Black voter districts in Texas.

Additionally, Bannon called on Trump, his Office of Budget and Management Director Russell Vought and Republican leaders in Congress to further “maximalize” control of government and to “seize the institutions. …If we don’t do that now, we’re going to lose this chance forever, because you’re never going to have another Trump.”

The Project 2025 Power Grab

Russell Vought, a key architect of conservative agendas like Project 2025, has led many of the administration’s legally dubious actions aimed at consolidating executive power. This includes firing 17 nonpartisan inspectors general who oversee agency spending, freezing billions in funds appropriated by Congress for health and education, and most recently, blocking over $5 billion in SNAP funding intended for 42 million low-income Americans.

“This administration is lawless to its core,” said House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, in a statement. “Ever since the moment they took office, President Trump and Director Vought have been breaking the law. … Day after day, this administration undermines the power of Congress, while Republicans sit idly by and let them do it. We must stand against this law breaking and protect our authority as a co-equal branch of government.”

A federal judge said Monday that she will continue to block the Trump administration from enforcing a memo directing states to “undo the issuance” of full SNAP benefits, which at least 20 states did during the legal wrangling over SNAP last week in two federal courts, ABCNews reported.

During a tense hearing, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani rebuked the Trump administration for “trying to play vindictive games” with states that sent benefits to increasingly desperate SNAP recipients.

The Fight Against Lawlessness

The tension over the rule of law is further heightened by disturbing reports that at least 170 American citizens have been detained and held against their will during immigration raids, 20 children among them, according to a ProPublica report.

Deportation agents, rather than using intelligence to target specific individuals who have violated federal law, are targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants might be, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations.

After a recent Supreme Court ruling essentially permitted racial profiling of suspected illegal immigrants, federal officials now roll through the communities conducting broad sweeps, violating the rights of both citizens and noncitizens, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

 “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context,” Bier said.

 “Any one of us could be next,” Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, told ProPublica.

While Democrats are outnumbered in Congress, and the Supreme Court is currently stacked with Trump-leaning conservatives, state governments can effectively fight back against Trump and MAGA-driven policy initiatives, argued Steven Strauss, a professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs in a recent essay in The Bulwark.

“Just as the Trump administration has ‘flooded the zone’ to use a phrase that Steve Bannon likes, so should the state commissions, taking the fight to major policy initiatives wherever laws are being broken,” Strauss said, citing the illegal detention of American citizens by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an example.

“Disturbing reports show masked ICE agents seizing citizens on the street and demanding proof of citizenship, despite having zero legal authority over U.S. citizens, and detaining them, sometimes for days. This is unconstitutional detention. No American should be forced to carry a passport or a birth certificate to avoid unlawful detention by federal agents.”

Undeterred, Bannon continues to urge his followers to “go to the ramparts” in this “revolutionary time.”

“The strength of the populist nationalist MAGA movement in this country is we’re anti-fragile,” he said during an interview with the Economist in late October. “We’re resilient. You can give us your best shot. You can put us in prison, … you can debank us, you can deplatform us … We can’t be beaten if we don’t quit.”

“Serious people like Russ Vought and others have spent years thinking this whole plan through,” Bannon said. “We must strike and we must strike now.”

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