Former Trump senior adviser Jared Kushner commented on his feud with Steve Bannon that led to his White House ouster, likening the former chief strategist to a “suicide bomber” who “blew up.”
Kushner, who is also former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, offered the analogy during an appearance on The Hugh Hewitt Show Friday. Hewitt compared Trump’s affinity for Bannon to his treatment of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), with whom he has a frosty relationship. The Breitbart News co-founder, who helped Trump win his 2016 presidential bid, left the White House in August 2017 following months of reported friction with Kushner and other advisers.
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“I think, if you look at Steve … Steve was actually with us very early,” Kushner said after being asked about Trump’s deference for Bannon. “He was great on the campaign. He was a great partner when it got to the White House. I think maybe the power got to his head a little bit, or he just — it was being more of what he was.”
Bannon’s standing in Trump’s orbit diminished significantly in the months after his White House departure, when he was outed as a source in the first major Trump administration tell-all, Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff. He maintained his loyalty to Trump, however, and slowly fell back in favor with the president. Kushner, who was on Hewitt’s program to promote his memoir Breaking History, didn’t shy away from discussing Bannon’s White House downfall, which he denied responsibility for.
“It became very divisive. He was undermining us, knife-fighting with colleagues, and it just wasn’t helping us implement the agenda,” Kushner explained. “That was very unfortunate, but one thing I write about in the book is — I go through a lot of the different interpersonal dynamics — is that I ended up not defeating Steve. Steve really defeated himself, you know. His head got so big he was just doing all these crazy things, and he ultimately, just, you know, like a suicide bomber, blew up.”
Kushner appeared to reference Bannon’s return to Trump’s good graces, noting that he had reinvented himself as a “MAGA cheerleader” who is “probably right on a lot of issues.”
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Regardless of the previous bad blood, Kushner told Hewitt that he had learned from his experiences with Bannon.
“I think that Steve is somebody who I portray [in the memoir] as he is. He’s a very smart person, he’s a very talented person, and he’s somebody who’s a very formidable opponent,” Kushner said. “And I still don’t know how we kind of got to become opponents.”
