Donald Trump said his former top adviser, Steve Bannon, has “lost his mind” after Bannon criticized his son, Donald Trump Jr., in a soon-to-be published book.
“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,” Trump said in a statement. “Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating 17 candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican Party.”
Bannon was fired as Trump’s chief strategist in August and returned to leading Breitbart News, the organization he left in summer 2016 to lead Trump’s presidential campaign.
“Now that he’s on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look,” it continued. “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 30 years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself.”
Trump added that Bannon “pretends” to be at war with the media, “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.” This pretending, Trump said, “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,” Trump added.
“We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda,” Trump said. “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.”
Trump’s statement comes after The Guardian reported that the upcoming Michael Wolff book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” quotes Bannon blasting Trump Jr.’s decision to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the campaign in 2016 as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”
“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s—, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” Bannon is quoted as saying. “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”
The Guardian said Bannon also offered his theories about the direction of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s possible ties to Russia.
“You realize where this is going,” he told Wolff. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to f—ing Trump goes right through [indicted former campaign manager] Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner … It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”