Trump aides agree to end ‘palace intrigue’
WASHINGTON: Top White House aides Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner met and agreed to “bury the hatchet” over their differences, a senior administration official said on Saturday, in a bid to stop infighting that has distracted from President Donald Trump’s message.
Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, and Kushner, an influential adviser and Trump’s son-in-law, met on Friday at the request of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus who told them that if they have any policy differences, they should air them internally, the official said.
Priebus’ message to Bannon and Kushner was to “stop with the palace intrigue” and focus on the president’s agenda, the official told Reuters.
Both aides left having agreed that it was time to “bury the hatchet and move forward”, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Four former advisers to the president said Trump is accustomed to chaos in his decades-long career as a real estate developer but that even he has grown weary of the infighting.
“He’s got a long fuse for that kind of thing,” said one former adviser. “I imagine he has gotten tired of this.” Bannon, former chief of the conservative news organisation Breitbart News, has been at odds with Kushner and Gary Cohn, the head of the White House National Economic Council, an administration official and the four former advisers said.
The former Trump advisers said Kushner, husband of Trump daughter Ivanka Trump, is trying to tug the president into a more mainstream position, while Bannon is trying to keep aflame the nationalist fervour that carried Trump to his election victory on Nov 8.
Bannon is getting some of the blame for the administration’s early stumbles because, one former adviser said, “the president demands results”.
In what was viewed as a sign of Bannon’s declining influence, he was removed from his seat on the National Security Council this week.
Administration officials said this was done at the urging of national security adviser H.R. McMaster, with whom Bannon had clashed.
Bill Daley, a former White House chief of staff to ex-president Barack Obama, said it appears that inside the Trump White House there’s a struggle for “the soul and brain of the president”. – Reuters