Bannon forced out of Trump administration
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s chief political strategist Steven Bannon has agreed to step down.
“White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced in a Friday afternoon statement.
Politico reported that Bannon turned in his resignation on Aug. 7. The resignation or forced firing, as some have called it, came during heated criticism that Trump should fire Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. Trump defended his embattled national security adviser, after what appeared to be an orchestrated campaign by the nationalist wing of his political coalition accusing him of undermining the president’s agenda and calling for his dismissal.
Trump emailed The New York Times in early August, saying McMaster “is a good man and very pro–Israel. I am grateful for the work he continues to do serving our country.”
That is when Bannon’s days may have been numbered because of his views on China. Bannon’s insistence on provoking a trade war with China threatened to derail the administration’s efforts to halt North Korea’s nuclear program vis-a-vis Beijing using its economic leverage to force concessions from Pyongyang.
Bannon’s departure comes three weeks after White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci tenured his resignation, three-and-a-half weeks after Reince Priebus stepped down as chief of staff, and about a month after Sean Spicer said he would not continue as press secretary.
Bannon is the 15th person to either quit or be dismissed from the Trump administration, the Washington Post reported Friday.
Bannon served as executive chairman of the ultra-conservative news organization Breitbart prior to becoming Trump campaign CEO last summer. He is widely credited as having engineered Trump’s White House victory in part by manufacturing an alliance between elements of the alt-right and the Republican Party.
Left-leaning critics have alleged that Bannon is racist and xenophobic, as well as anti-Semitic.
Bannon in a recent interview with The American Prospect indirectly defended Trump’s recent suggestion of moral parity between anti-racist counter-protesters and the white nationalists they confronted at a violent rally last weekend in Charlottesville, Va.
Bannon said Trump would benefit politically from leftist anti-racist outrage.
“The Democrats… the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats,” he said.
Bannon said in the interview that he disagreed with the status-quo China trade policies espoused by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Chair Gary Cohn, and instead wished to engage in a trade war with Beijing.
Bannon said he clashed with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson over the continuance of Obama State Department appointee Susan Thornton as acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Bannon said he was working to get Thornton “out” and was working to replace her and other tenured appointees with “hawks.”
In that interview, Bannon contradicted Trump’s hard-line response to recent North Korean nuclear provocations.
“There’s no military solution … Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons…there’s no military solution here, they got us,” he said.
This article is republished with permission from Talk Media News
Bryan is an award-winning political journalist who has extensive experience covering Congress and Maryland state government.
His work includes coverage of the election of Donald Trump, the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and attorneys general William Barr and Jeff Sessions-as well as that of the Maryland General Assembly, Gov. Larry Hogan, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bryan has broken stories involving athletic and sexual assault scandals with the Baltimore Post-Examiner.
His original UMBC investigation gained international attention, was featured in People Magazine and he was interviewed by ABC’s “Good Morning America” and local radio stations. Bryan broke subsequent stories documenting UMBC’s omission of a sexual assault on their daily crime log and a federal investigation related to the university’s handling of an alleged sexual assault.