Photo Credit: Michael Vadon (CC-by-SA 4.0)
The Guardian reported a new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff, quoted former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon calling the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump, Jr and other campaign staffers and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”
Bannon who was the executive chairman of Breitbart News and avid Trump supporter became the campaign’s CEO three months before the election and then was appointed as the White Chief Strategist who reported only to President Donald Trump. Bannon was ousted from the White House in August of last year. He returned to his role at Breitbart News and resumed hosting his radio show on Sirius XM radio.
Bannon opposed Trump during the Alabama Republican Primary for U.S. Senate. Trump supported the incumbent U.S. Senator Luther Strange while Bannon backed the eventual nominee former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore who lost to the Democrat nominee Doug Jones in the December 12th special election after being accused of sexual assault and misconduct by several women.
The White House on Wednesday afternoon responded to Bannon’s remarks releasing a 266-word statement from President Trump who blasted his former aide:
Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. 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
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.
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. 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.
We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.