Bannon apologizes for role in anti-Trump book
WASHINGTON — With President Trump cheering from the sidelines, the White House yesterday pressed its defense of the president’s fitness to govern, as fired former aide Steve Bannon reversed course and apologized for his role in a new book’s explosive portrait of Trump.
The president’s critics, meanwhile, said Trump’s stream of taunts and insults in response to the book — “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” released last week — only emphasized the author’s unsettling portrayal of Trump’s presidency, depicting a leader whose own aides consider him childish, ignorant and dangerously erratic.
The most vehement defense of Trump came from senior adviser Stephen Miller, a former Bannon acolyte who distanced himself from his former mentor. Miller, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” called the book “grotesque” and writer Michael Wolff “the garbage author of a garbage book.”
Miller called Bannon, one of Wolff’s principal sources, “angry and vindictive.”
The author quoted Bannon as using the label “treasonous” for a Trump Tower meeting last year with Kremlin-linked figures, in which Donald Trump Jr. took part.
The book quoted Bannon as predicting that the younger Trump would “crack … like an egg” in the face of the Russia investigation being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Yesterday, however, Bannon — who has faced withering attacks from Trump since the book’s contents were first aired — sought to mend fences, praising Trump’s son as “both a patriot and a good man.”
“He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around,” Bannon said in a statement — a striking reversal of the stance he struck in Wolff’s telling.
Also yesterday, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Wolff’s characterization of Trump as averse to digesting classified briefing material was “ludicrous.”
Trump is known to closely monitor aides’ televised performances in putting forth his case, and he gleefully weighed in within moments of Miller’s televised clash with “State of the Union” host Jake Tapper. CNN has long been a particular target of Trump’s.
“Jake Tapper of Fake News just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller,” the president tweeted. “Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!”