After two excerpts from a forthcoming book revealed Steve Bannon criticizing President Donald Trump and his campaign, the President released a statement Wednesday afternoon tearing into Bannon.
Trump said that Bannon “lost his mind” after he was “fired” from his White House job, and the President declared that Bannon “had very little to do” with Trump’s victory.
Bannon spoke to author Michael Wolff for a book coming out next week titled “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” Bannon told Wolff that the June 2016 meeting attended by Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner with a Kremlin-linked lawyer was “treasonous,” according to The Guardian. Just a few hours after The Guardian published a few quotes from Bannon that appeared in the book, New York Magazine published an excerpt suggesting that Bannon did not take Trump seriously and that Bannon played a major role in Trump’s first actions as president.
This apparently enraged the President.
In a lengthy statement, Trump unleashed on Bannon. He claimed that Bannon did little to help secure Trump’s presidential victory and accused Bannon of only working to promote himself.
“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 the statement.
The President then blamed Bannon for Roy Moore’s loss in the Alabama Senate race and generally insulted Bannon’s political abilities.
“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,” Trump said in the statement.
“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,” Trump continued. “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.”
Read Trump’s full statement:
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.
