Trump Throws Bannon Overboard

by Deacon Blues

Well, let's see how strong the Breitbart/Bannon "force" is now. We now are witnessing a real civil war inside the GOP, where Trump will eventually win, but at what cost?

"Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency," the statement said. "When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party."

Trump continued: "Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself."

The statement from Trump came after Bannon has criticized Trump and his family in recent interviews — mocking the president’s intellect, criticizing the operations of the White House and torching Donald Trump Jr. and the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. His most recent comments, published online Wednesday in excerpts from a book by journalist Michael Wolff, came two weeks after a Bannon profile in Vanity Fair that infuriated the president and his senior aides.

"Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was," Trump’s statement said. "It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books."

Sure, Mitch McConnell is a happy guy today because he pulled Trump back into his orbit with Bannon's banishment. But how much of Trump's nationalistic alt-right base will travel back inside the Beltway with him, and how much of it will think that Trump has abandoned the cause? It won't be too hard for Bannon to point out that the tax scam Trump signed was clearly more "business as usual", a breach made all the more complete by today's trashing of Mr. Alt-Right.

Trump better hope that Bannon hasn't rolled on him to Mueller. But if Bannon hadn't done so yet, he certainly will do so now.