Trump blasts Stephen K. Bannon

President Donald J. Trump reacted to The Guardian‘s excerpt of the new book, which quoted his former campaign CEO and Senior White House strategist ridiculing the president and members of his family.

This is one key passage from The Guardian:

Bannon, who held a top role in the campaign, shares his disdain for other top officials for going blind into the meeting instead of dispatching a legal team to vet information in a hand-off way and failing to alert authorities of a possible crime.

He went after Donald Trump Jr. for participating, then expressed certainty about what happened next.

‘The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these Jumos up to his father’s office of the 26th floor is zero,’ Bannon said, in an excerpt from ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’ by Michael Wolff.

Here is the president’s response, which has stunned official and unofficial Washington:

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

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Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.

Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.