Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon once said he believed former President Donald Trump was suffering from early-stage dementia, according to former 60 Minutes producer Ira Rosen.
Rosen, who was promoting his new book, Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at “60 Minutes,” during an interview published Tuesday, writes that Bannon pushed him to write a story about Trump and invoking the 25th Amendment to strip the president of his powers.
“You break some news in the book about something Bannon had told you that wasn’t on 60 Minutes, and he did not share in the 60 Minutes interview, and I’ll just read a little from the book,” said one of the hosts of Yahoo News’s Skullduggery podcast. “‘His criticism of Trump privately to me took on a different tone.’ This is after he leaves the White House. ‘He believed Trump was suffering from early-stage dementia and that there was a real possibility that he would be removed from office by the 25th Amendment.'”
The host added, “And he even sends you a text: ‘You need to do the 25th Amendment piece. By the way, brother, I never steer you wrong.'”
Rosen noted that “Bannon realized that Trump was repeating the same stories over and over again” and referenced a New York Times column from commentator David Brooks in Oct. 2017. In particular, the passage: “The Republican senators greeted Trump on Capitol Hill and saw a president so repetitive and rambling, some thought he might be suffering from early Alzheimer’s. But they know which way the wind is blowing. They gave him a standing ovation.”
“Bannon kept saying this,” Rosen said. “And he wanted to do something about it.” He added: “Now the secret was that Bannon crazily thought that he could be president.”
Veteran @60Minutes producer Ira Rosen joins @Isikoff and @dklaidman to talk about the tradecraft of journalism, and to tell some truly amazing stories. Ira’s new tell-all book, Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes, is out today. Listen now:https://t.co/AFPKwRbJrc
— Skullduggery (@SkullduggeryPod) February 16, 2021
In an episode of his podcast, War Room, Bannon said the claim he brought up the 25th Amendment in relation to Trump was a “total fantasy” and a “total lie.”
In an interview that 60 Minutes conducted with Bannon, which Rosen also discussed, Bannon says the show “tried to trip me up about President Trump the entire time.” He called his performance “absolutely bulletproof.”
“There is no one in this country that has supported President Trump better, tougher, longer than Stephen K. Bannon,” he said. “This is another reporter trying to be a grifter.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Bannon for a response to Rosen’s comments but did not immediately hear back.
In 2018, Trump’s physician, Ronny Jackson, reported that he had administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment to the president, and Trump had received a score of 30/30. Jackson said that the president had “absolutely no cognitive or mental issues whatsoever.”
Bannon, a former Breitbart News executive chairman who joined Trump’s 2016 campaign in the final leg of the campaign, worked in the White House as a top adviser until they had a falling out in the fall of 2017. Following reports that they had reconciled, Trump pardoned Bannon, who was accused of conspiring to defraud donors to a fund to build a wall along the Mexican border, during his final hours in office.
Rosen shared about his many conversations with Bannon, calling the former White House strategist a “big talker.” Rosen also said that he became “kind of a therapist” for Bannon. “Steve and I would kind of loiter in the chief of staff’s office and drink Diet Cokes, he doesn’t drink alcohol, and he would just download to me on stories,” Rosen said.
Later in the interview, Rosen speculated that there was a time when Bannon eagerly wanted to see Trump’s political demise.
“I think, in Steve’s mind, if I had to do the analysis of it, he would have been very happy to see Trump disappear from the scenes either through the 25th Amendment, resigning or whatever, and then he would step in and fill and fill that gulf and carry the mantle of the Trump followers. But he was delusional about it,” Rosen said.
