Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon told an author that Donald Trump, Jr’s meeting with a Russian lawyer was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” to which President Donald Trump responded that Bannon has “lost his mind.”
“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 said.
The president on Wednesday issued a scathing, four-paragraph smackdown of Bannon in response to the negative comments made by Bannon.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” Trump wrote. “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.”
Bannon’s attacks on the Trumps appeared in the book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff. Those comments have been the focus of the Wednesday news cycle with liberal outlets and pundits pointing to the book as proof of collusion with Russia while the administration is attacking the book as little more than tabloid reading.
In the statement, Trump continued his takedown of Bannon saying that Steve is not an effective representative of his base.
“Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look,” Trump said. “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 president then confirms what others had said earlier, Bannon was responsible for the leaking of false information from the White House.
“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,” he said in the statement. “It is the only thing he does well.”
Trump then completed the public humiliation of Bannon while slipping in a jab at the author of the book.
“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.”
First Lady Melania Trump’s Communications Director Stephanie Grisham slammed “Fire and Fury” as “bargain fiction.”
“The book is clearly going to be sold in the bargain fiction section,” Grisham said. “Mrs. Trump supported her husband’s decision to run for President and in fact, encouraged him to do so. She was confident he would win and was very happy when he did.”
Grisham’s comments are in response to claims in the book that Melania didn’t want to be the first lady.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders joined in the attack on Wolff’s book.
“This book is filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House,” Sanders said in a statement. “Participating in a book that can only be described as trashy tabloid fiction exposes their sad desperate attempts at relevancy.”
Steve Bannon was fired by Trump in August and after leaving the White House, Bannon went on to back Roy Moore in Alabama for what should have been a safe Republican Senate seat. He lost. The lost seat has narrowed the Republican majority in the Senate to a single seat which could make passing the Trump agenda a little tougher.
