Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist, granted a series of interviews over the past two days in order to “take a bullet” for a president under fire by his critics, a source close to the White House said on Thursday.
“Steve did something that almost no one else in the West Wing would consider doing,” the source told the Washington Examiner. “He had someone fire live ammunition at him to draw attention away from POTUS. You have to respect that.”
Trump has struggled to move past his failure on Tuesday to confine blame for racially-motivated violence in Charlottesville, Va. this weekend to the white supremacist groups involved. Instead, Trump claimed there were “good people” among the neo-Nazis marching there and saddled the anti-fascist protesters who were present with an equal share of the blame.
Bannon, who rarely grants on-the-record interviews to reporters, spoke to three publications — the American Prospect, the New York Times and the Daily Mail — between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning. In them, he doubled down on Trump’s argument that removing Confederate statues erodes American culture and offered candid remarks about the lack of a military option for the U.S. in North Korea. Bannon also fired off an email to the Washington Post Thursday night that slammed “leftist elites” for failing to learn the lessons of Trump’s election victory.
Although one person familiar with the situation suggested initially that the chief strategist’s first interview was unintentional, another source close to the White House said Bannon sought out the reporter at the American Prospect, a left-leaning publication, in order to provide a distraction from the Charlottesville backlash.
Bannon had already come under scrutiny for his feud with national security adviser H.R. McMaster due to internal suspicion that Bannon had orchestrated a right-wing campaign against McMaster through a series of leaks. His position in the West Wing is considered tenuous, several sources have said, due to his reputation as an occasional troublemaker who has the tendency to operate outside the chain of command established by newly-minted chief of staff John Kelly.
