WASHINGTON
— President Trump essentially excommunicated his onetime chief
strategist Stephen K. Bannon on Wednesday, dismissing him as an aide who
had “very little to do with our historic victory” and has now “lost his
mind.”
In
a written statement, Mr. Trump fired back at Mr. Bannon, who had made
caustic comments about the president and his family to the author of a
new tell-all book about the Trump White House. While Mr. Bannon had been
pushed out of the White House last summer, he had remained in touch
with Mr. Trump, but the two now appear to have reached a breaking point.
“Steve
Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” Mr. Trump said in
the statement. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his
mind.”
Mr.
Trump berated Mr. Bannon for the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama and
said the former adviser did not represent him but is “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,” Mr. Trump added. “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.”
In the book, Mr. Bannon describes a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower that Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign aides had with several Russians as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”
An early copy of the book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff, was obtained by The Guardian, which first reported Mr. Bannon’s jolting comments.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment