I hope you’ve got your popcorn ready. Trump is now responding to the comments reported on by Steve Bannon in the new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
Via Chad Pergram from Fox News:
#BREAKING Trump: 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
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) January 3, 2018
Trump on Bannon: 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..Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by GOPers
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) January 3, 2018
Trump on Bannon: 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.
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) January 3, 2018
Trump on Bannon: 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.
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) January 3, 2018
I think there are more than a few people that would agree that Bannon was a leaker in the White House. I’ve already seen that this morning from conservatives like Ben Shapiro. But blaming the loss of the Alabama seat on Bannon is just wrong. That had much more to do with the media attack on Moore than it did Bannon.
And to say Bannon had “very little” to do with Trump’s victory in 2016, when he was Trump’s campaign manager for the last three months of his campaign, seems like a big stretch.
Trump is just hitting back at Bannon because that’s what he does. Some of what he says may be true, but some of it is clearly boloney.
But hey, he fights!
UPDATE: Here is Trump’s full statement:
Trump totally torches Bannon: “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” Full statement: pic.twitter.com/ElhChPiOx8
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) January 3, 2018