Bannon blasts ‘Javanka’
Controversial former chief strategist says the president’s daughter and son-in-law are naive and risk destroying the administration.
US President Donald Trump’s sonin-law is a political lightweight responsible for the worst decisions the administration has made, and his daughter is the biggest source of embarrassing leaks, according to Steve Bannon.
In an extraordinary interview that reveals the scale of infighting around the president, the former White House chief strategist has claimed that Jared Kushner risks destroying the administration through his bad advice.
Kushner is married to Ivanka Trump, who Bannon described as ‘‘the queen of leaks’’. He said the couple – whom he dubbed ‘‘Javanka’’ – led a faction in the West Wing that Bannon described as a cabal of ‘‘Democrats’’ who were undermining the president.
‘‘The railhead of all bad decisions is the same railhead: Javanka,’’ Bannon told Vanity Fair magazine as he accused Kushner of being naive and exposing the administration by holding meetings with figures linked to Moscow during last year’s election campaign. Allegations of collusion are under investigation.
‘‘He’s taking meetings with Russians to get additional stuff. This tells you everything about Jared,’’ Bannon said. ‘‘They were looking for the picture of Hillary Clinton taking the bag of cash from Putin. That’s his maturity level.’’
A former US naval officer who went on to work as a banker at Goldman Sachs, Bannon is credited with turning the populist American right into the political force that put Donald Trump in power.
As head of the Trump campaign in its last months, he encouraged his boss to mine a deep vein of disaffection among white workingclass Americans and embrace a message of economic populism and nationalism. The strategy worked and earned Bannon an influential place in the White House.
He was closely involved in controversial executive orders passed in the first few months of the administration, such as a travel ban on people from Muslim countries and a directive to begin building a wall across the USMexican border.
However, Bannon’s star waned amid the political and legal consequences, and Kushner, Trump and their West Wing allies pushed for policies that would be seen as more acceptable to the public.
Bannon left the White House in August after 71⁄2 months in office, amid infighting with members of Trump’s family. Before departing, he told Kushner that encouraging the president to fire James Comey, the FBI chief investigating possible collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russia, was a grave mistake. Trump dismissed Comey in May.
Bannon said he told Kushner: ‘‘We make a lot of bad decisions, and the bad decisions have to do with you.’’
The outcome it triggered – the appointment of a special counsel to independently investigate the allegations of Russian collusion –
[Jared Kushner was] looking for the picture of Hillary Clinton taking the bag of cash from Putin. That’s his maturity level. Steve Bannon
put Trump at risk of being impeached, Bannon said. Kushner has denied collusion.
Bannon said that in his view, the firing of the FBI director was ‘‘the dumbest political decision in modern political history, bar none. A self-inflicted wound of massive proportions’’.
He has since returned to rightwing news website Breitbart as chairman, a perch Bannon said allowed him to exert political force unshackled. In the White House, he had ‘‘influence – but just influence’’, he said. ‘‘Now, I have power. I can actually drive things in a certain direction.’’
However, Bannon’s reputation as a political operator suffered this month when Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate he had backed, lost to a Democrat in a safe Republican state. Bannon suggested that Ivanka Trump was partly to blame, because of comments she made damning Moore.
Ivanka Trump was a ‘‘fount of bad advice’’ during the campaign, Bannon said, suggesting that her comments risked reigniting allegations surrounding her father.
‘‘What about the allegations about her dad and that 13-yearold?’’ Bannon, said referring to a lawsuit, since dropped, accusing Donald Trump of raping a minor. He has denied the allegation.
Bannon, who the article says has likened Donald Trump’s behaviour to that of ‘‘an 11-year-old child’’ who had ‘‘lost a step’’ since taking office, remains in the president’s circle.
Bannon said he and the president continued to speak on the phone. However, according to the article, the White House suggested that the two men had held just five phone calls since Bannon’s departure, which were ‘‘primarily opportunities for Steve to beg for his job back’’.
Prominent elements of Bannon’s world view could be heard in Trump’s national security strategy speech this week, in which he labelled China and Russia rival powers against which the US will compete.
As the president was laying out his strategy, Bannon was in the midst of a global tour to expand the reach of the alt-right movement championed by Breitbart.
In Japan, he likened the rise of China to Nazi Germany’s expansion, warning that its ‘‘frightening, audacious, and global ambitions’’ must be contained.
It is clear that Bannon will not disappear from American politics soon, and he may harbour even grander ambitions. In October, he is said to have told an ally that he would consider running for president in 2020 if Trump did not seek re-election.