printWhat Mr. Bannon said about the Trump family (he’s correct about Ivanka) and its dealings is unflattering, to say the least. Via NBC News:
In a new book, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, calls a meeting of Trump campaign officials with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower during the presidential campaign “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”
The book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” soon to be published by Henry Holt, was written by Michael Wolff, a columnist and an author who has written several books, including a biography of Rupert Murdoch. In it, Bannon rips into Donald Trump Jr.; White House senior adviser Jared Kushner; and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort for taking a June 2016 meeting with a group of Russians who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. …
Via Politico.com comes the full statement from President Donald Trump, in response to Steve Bannon.
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.
A question to Steve Bannon: If this is what you think, why did you not warn Deplorables?
UPDATE: MORE UGLY details from the new book on Trump’s White House.
1. Trump’s team had concerns about his ability to process information and make decisions
Trump has excoriated media accounts that he spends hours a day watching television and has said he spends a good deal of time reading “documents.”
Wolff’s reporting indicated Trump’s team felt otherwise.
“He didn’t process information in any conventional sense,” Wolff wrote. “He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said [former deputy chief of staff Katie] Walsh, ‘like trying to figure out what a child wants.’” …