Steve Bannon, a key populist voice in the Trump administration, is out as White House chief strategist, the Drudge Report first reported on Friday.
Bannon, who previously served as editor of Breitbart News, has been on thin ice for some time. This week, Bannon gave a series of interviews to various publications in which he undercut his White House colleagues and the president’s foreign policy messaging, contradicting Trump and his generals’ statements that military intervention was a possibility in North Korea.
It’s not clear exactly how the divorce took place. Two administration sources told the New York Times that while Trump has decided to part ways with Bannon, the president had yet to decide how and when the action should be made public. Meanwhile, a person close to Bannon says the chief strategist actually submitted his resignation on August 7, but the announcement was delayed in the wake of white nationalist protests in Charlottesville last weekend. But then Fox Business’s Charles Gasparino had previously reported that Bannon was actually resisting White House pressure to resign from public humiliation.
From the Times story:
Update, 1:40 p.m.: It is unclear what role new chief of staff John Kelly played in Bannon’s dismissal. But the stragetist’s rogue behavior over the past few days has certainly irritated the former general, who entered office with an agenda of putting an end to the factionalism and backbiting that plagued the administration under Bannon ally Reince Priebus. Update, 1:42 p.m.: Jim Acosta reports that today is Bannon’s last day in the White House.
WH: Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 18, 2017
Upate, 3:35 p.m.: Breitbart’s angle maybe gives a clue how Bannon himself will be acting in the days to come:
Update, 4:37 p.m.: Unlike other White House outcasts, Bannon isn’t planning to slip away into obscurity. Axios’s Jonathan Swan reports that Bannon feels liberated now that he’s not tied to the White House, and has been meeting with billionaire Bob Mercer to discuss the next move in pushing his populist agenda. A source tells Swan that Bannon and his old publication Breitbart—which he’s reportedly called his “killing machine”—will go “thermonuclear” against White House officials like H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn whom Bannon sees as “globalists.”
