Trump rebukes Bannon
Ex-aide reportedly mocked president, his family
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump declared his former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon persona non grata Wednesday, delivering a scorching rebuke to the man who had been Trump’s most visible partner in his efforts to redefine the Republican Party according to their populist and nationalist vision.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” Trump said in a caustic four-paragraph statement released by the White House. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
Trump rarely dispatches his advisers entirely, whether he fires them or they are disgraced. Bannon had tested that in recent months, however, with reported comments mocking Trump and his children and casting himself as a master strategist and political theorist.
The president’s public denunciation of Bannon came only after a report early Wednesday, based on excerpts from a forthcoming book, that quoted Bannon condemning as “treasonous” a June 2016 meeting in which Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, met with Kremlin-linked Russians to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
“Even if you thought that this was
not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” Bannon reportedly said.
His verdict on the meeting in Trump Tower — an event now at the center of a special counsel’s criminal investigation of Russian election meddling and potential Trump campaign complicity — was taken from a book to be released next week and obtained before publication by The Guardian newspaper. Bannon’s reported comment is an especially damning charge, undercutting Trump’s claim that the Russia story is a Democratic hoax.
Other portions of the book, as reported by The Guardian and excerpted in New York magazine, quote other Trump aides, and overall they portray him as ill-informed, unprepared and ill-tempered and contend that neither Trump nor family members and associates expected him to win election. In a separate statement, the spokeswoman for first lady Melania Trump denied an assertion that “Melania was in tears — and not of joy.”
Bannon, who led Trump’s campaign through most of the general election season and was a senior White House counselor for seven months, has long used the populist website he runs, Breitbart News, to war against mainstream Republicans and party leaders while giving voice to white nationalists. After his firing in August, Bannon sounded a fresh declaration of intraparty war, vowing to support challengers to Republican lawmakers insufficiently supportive of Trump’s protectionist populism and immigration policies.
But even as he rankled many Trump allies and GOP congressional leaders, Bannon enjoyed a continued relationship with Trump, who praised him publicly and sought his advice. When Bannon left the White House, Trump thanked him for his service on Twitter.
Bannon’s critics blamed him for encouraging Trump’s most destructive instincts and for the president’s failure to appeal to voters beyond his political base. A smaller group of supporters praised Bannon for helping the president solidify that base.
Trump’s disowning of Bannon immediately cheered mainstream Republicans. A political group tied to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has long been a Bannon target, summed up its glee in a Twitter message that had no words, just a short video of McConnell grinning.
Trump’s oldest son tweeted that Bannon had turned the opportunity of working in the White House “into a nightmare of backstabbing, harassing, leaking, lying & undermining the President. Steve is not a strategist, he is an opportunist.”
The president apparently reached the same conclusion. In his statement he dismissed Bannon as “a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination.”
Trump blamed Bannon for leaking to the media while in the White House and for losing an Alabama Senate seat in last month’s special election.
Bannon is expected to testify soon in a closed hearing of the House Intelligence Committee.