So a big drama dominated the news cycle today. A new book written by Michael Wolff claims that Steve Bannon referred to Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a group of Russians as treasonous and unpatriotic.
Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has described the Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.
Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.
Bannon, who was chief executive of the Trump campaign in its final three months, then White House chief strategist for seven months before returning to the rightwing Breitbart News, is a central figure in the nasty, cutthroat drama, quoted extensively, often in salty language.
Some of the material from this book is already being questioned and we haven’t heard an official statement from Bannon on this quote. This Wolff character who wrote the book doesn’t appear to be all that trustworthy either. He looks like a racial Jew although I couldn’t find proof of this.
Michael Wolff – author of the book in question.
Trump responded strongly to this and condemned Bannon.
Here’s his 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.
This entire drama is ridiculous.
If we are to assume that this isn’t a misquote of Bannon, his comments about Don Jr.’s meeting with the Russians being treasonous are grossly inaccurate. The Russian narrative is a documented hoax. Nothing came out of that Don Jr. meeting with the Russians. In fact, the whole thing appears to have been a setup to help frame the Russia conspiracy narrative.
Trump’s response was like pouring gasoline on fire. If his goal was to get the media focused on the drama, he certainly succeeded. I’m just not sure how this helps him in the long term though.
Even though Bannon is being blamed for Roy Moore’s loss in Alabama, it was really the Republican establishment’s fault. They threw Moore under the bus and blamed Bannon when he failed to win. This one loss doesn’t make the Bannon political strategy any less valid. Trump’s political agenda has a better chance of success with populist type candidates in office. That’s just an objective fact.
A statement direct from Bannon would clear up much of this but he’s been quiet since this news broke.
Ultimately though, the average person doesn’t care about any of this stuff. It’s just short term noise that will eat up the news cycle for a bit. I’m honestly surprised that there has been so much focus on it, but it’s possible they needed something to shift people’s attention away from Iran. That hasn’t gone well with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard announcing the defeat of the terrorist protesters.
