White House review nears end: Officials expect Bannon firing
White House review nears end: Officials expect Bannon firing
Carolyn Kaster / AP
A decision is imminent from White House chief of staff John Kelly on whether Steve Bannon will keep his job, according to administration officials with knowledge of the situation:
- Bannon, who has run afoul of Trump in the past, is now suspected by the president of leaking about his West Wing colleagues. And Trump resents the publicity Bannon has been getting as mastermind of the campaign.
- Many West Wing officials are now asking "when," not "if," Bannon goes.
- Chief of Staff General John Kelly has been reviewing Bannon's position.
- A recent deluge of media coverage of Bannon — including Bannon's explosive conversation with the American Prospect — have not escaped either the president's or Kelly's attention.
Why Bannon might still survive:
- Trump often sends mixed signals about his personnel plans, and makes decisions — both to keep and dismiss people — on whim.
- Bannon, with his close connection to the president's base, is the one West Wing official who could do authentic damage to Trump on the outside.
- We're told that Bannon's friendship with the billionaire Mercer family, who has been an important Trump ally, is a factor in the president's decision and could be part of the strategist's survival package.
- That's readily apparent from his media appearances. He seems unburdened, giving on the record interviews to publications including the New York Times, where he's unapologetically defending Trump's controversial comments in the fallout from the racist carnage in Charlottesville.
- One senior White House said it seemed like Bannon was setting himself up to be a martyr — the nationalist hero fired by the "globalists."
- He'd return to the outside world, a leader in the populist nationalist movement worldwide, with a partner in hedge fund billionaire Bob Mercer, who has deep pockets and would make Bannon even more of a force to be reckoned with on the outside. Plus he has the killing machine of Breitbart to return to.
- A source close to Bannon: "This week is a good window into what Bannon outside the [White House] would look like: A strong defense of POTUS and 'fire and fury' for enemies of The Trump agenda."
- "Get ready for Bannon the barbarian."
UPDATE:
Trump Tells Aides He Has Decided to Remove Stephen Bannon
- Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist, on Aug. 2 at the White House.
DOUG MILLS / THE NEW YORK TIMES
By MAGGIE HABERMAN
AUGUST 18, 2017
The president and senior White House officials were debating when and how to dismiss Mr. Bannon. The two administration officials cautioned that Mr. Trump is known to be averse to confrontation within his inner circle, and could decide to keep on Mr. Bannon for some time.
As of Friday morning, the two men were still discussing Mr. Bannon’s future, the officials said. A person close to Mr. Bannon insisted the parting of ways was his idea, and that he had submitted his resignation to the president on Aug. 7, to be announced at the start of this week, but it was delayed in the wake of the racial unrest in Charlottesville, Va.
Mr. Bannon had clashed for months with other senior West Wing advisers and members of the president’s family.
But the loss of Mr. Bannon, the right-wing nationalist who helped propel some of Mr. Trump’s campaign promises into policy reality, raises the potential for the president to face criticism from the conservative news media base that supported him over the past year.
Mr. Bannon’s many critics bore down after the violence in Charlottesville. Outraged over Mr. Trump’s insistence that “both sides” were to blame for the violence that erupted at a white nationalist rally, leaving one woman dead, human rights activists demanded that the president fire so-called nationalists working in the West Wing. That group of hard-right populists in the White House is led by Mr. Bannon.
On Tuesday at Trump Tower in New York, Mr. Trump refused to guarantee Mr. Bannon’s job security but defended him as “not a racist” and “a friend.”
“We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Bannon’s dismissal followed an Aug. 16 interview he initiated with a writer with whom he had never spoken, with the progressive publication The American Prospect. In it, Mr. Bannon mockingly played down the American military threat to North Korea as nonsensical: “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”
He also bad-mouthed his colleagues in the Trump administration, vowed to oust a female diplomat at the State Department and mocked officials as “wetting themselves” over the consequences of radically changing trade policy.
Of the far right, he said, “These guys are a collection of clowns,” and he called it a “fringe element” of “losers.”
“We gotta help crush it,” he said in the interview, which people close to Mr. Bannon said he believed was off the record.
Mr. Bannon’s departure was long rumored in Washington. The president’s new chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was brought on for his ability to organize a chaotic staff, was said to have grown weary of the chief strategist’s long-running feud with Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser.
Mr. Bannon had been aligned with Mr. Kelly’s predecessor, Reince Priebus, who was forced out in late July. More significantly, Mr. Bannon has been in a battle with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, since the spring.
Mr. Bannon, whose campaign against “globalists” was a hallmark of his tenure steering the right-wing website Breitbart.com, and Mr. Kushner had been allies throughout the transition process and through the beginning of the administration.
But their alliance ruptured as Mr. Trump elevated the roles of Gary D. Cohn, his top economic policy adviser and a former official at Goldman Sachs, and Dina Powell, a former Bush administration official who also worked on Wall Street. Mr. Cohn is a registered Democrat, and both he and Ms. Powell have been denounced by conservative media outlets as being antithetical to Mr. Trump’s populist message.
Mr. Cohn is a registered Democrat, and both he and Ms. Powell have been denounced by conservative media outlets as being antithetical to Mr. Trump’s populist message.
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