White House’s chief strategist Steve Bannon will soon leave the Trump administration, with the president telling aides on Friday that he would remove him at an unspecified future date.
The New York times reports that a person close to Bannon insists it was his idea, and that he submitted a resignation letter on August 7.
Trump and Bannon are still discussing Bannon’s future, according to the Times.
White House officials did not immediately confirm the reported move, which would send the most conservative leader in the Trump West Wing out after less than eight months.
OUT: Steve Bannon was ousted from the White House dramatically on Friday just after midday
A senior White House aide told DailyMail.com on Tuesday that Bannon’s job was secure.
‘Steve’s staying,’ the official said then.
But after that the former Trump campaign CEO who was once executive chairman of Breitbart News took down his guard and gave an interview to a liberal magazine in which he contradicted the president’s position on North Korea and trashed his more moderate colleagues for their views on an ‘economic war’ with China.
And he tried gamely to frame that interview as a win for the president, claiming the resulting furor drew attention away from Trump’s widely panned responses to the weekend’s racial violence in Charlottesville Virginia.
Trump has not yet commented on Twitter or elsewhere. Bannon is famously reclusive with his communications, eschewing social media and speaking only to a handful of reporters on a regular basis.
But he was said on Friday to be furious over Bannon’s habit of taking credit for his 2016 election.
In ‘Devil’s Bargain,’ a book by Joshua Green published last month, Bannon is painted as the mastermind behind Trump’s ascendancy.
And the president was not pleased.
‘That f***ing Steve Bannon [is] taking credit for my election,’ Trump recently told a confidant, according to the left-leaning Buzzfeed website.
The book is a look-back on Bannon’s role in leveraging Trump’s connection with his base last year as his populist economic message attracted middle-class white voters
Trump took pains to avoid backing him too firmly during a press conference on Tuesday, referring to him only as ‘Mr. Bannon’ while defending him against charges of bigotry.
‘He is not a racist. I can tell you that. He is a good person. He actually gets a very unfair press in that regard,’ Trump said in response to a question about whether he’ll keep him.
‘We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon. He is a good person and I think the press treats him, frankly, very unfairly.’