Defiant Bannon declares Trump’s presidency is over

Banon and Trump

A defiant Steve Bannon declared the Trump presidency he had campaigned for was over as he vowed to carry on the fight after being ousted as the White House chief strategist.

Within hours of leaving office, Bannon was back at Breitbart News, the right wing website he ran, presiding over the evening news conference.

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” he told the Weekly Standard.

“There’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days . . . I feel jacked up. Now I’ve got my hands back on my weapons,” he added, vowing that “Bannon the barbarian” would crush the opposition.

Bannon (63) helped shape US President Donald Trump’s America First campaign message, but fell foul of moderate White House forces.

He has been accused of voicing anti-Semitic and white supremacist views.

He is the latest high-profile figure to be removed from the White House team.

National security advisor Michael Flynn, press secretary Sean Spicer, chief of staff Reince Priebus and communications director Anthony Scaramucci have all gone.

Bannon pledged loyalty to Trump, telling media house Bloomberg he would go to war “for Trump” against his opponents on Capitol Hill, in the media and in corporate America.

In a statement meant to avoid Trump having to put his name to the firing of the man who most connects him to his die-hard supporters, the White House said Bannon and chief of staff John Kelly had “mutually agreed” that he would go.

Meanwhile, with prominent Republicans openly questioning his competence and moral leadership, Trump burrowed deeper into the racially charged debate over Confederate memorials and lashed out at members of his own party in the latest controversy to engulf his presidency.

Out of sight, but still online, Trump tweeted his defence of monuments to Confederate icons — bemoaning rising efforts to remove them as an attack on America’s “history and culture”.

And he berated his critics who, with increasingly sharper language, have denounced his initially slow and then ultimately combative comments on the racial violence at a white supremacist rally last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Trump was much quicker on Thursday to condemn violence in Barcelona, where more than a dozen people were killed when a van veered onto a sidewalk and sped down a busy pedestrian zone in what authorities called a terror attack.

He then added to his expression of support a tweet reviving a debunked legend about a US general subduing Muslim rebels a century ago in the Philippines by shooting them with bullets dipped in pig blood.

“Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!” Trump wrote.

Trump’s unpredictable, defiant and, critics claim, racially provocative behaviour has clearly begun to wear on his Republican allies.

Tennessee senator Bob Corker, whom Trump considered for a Cabinet post, declared on Thursday that “the president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to” in dealing with crises. And senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska tweeted: “Anything less than complete & unambiguous condemnation of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the KKK by the @POTUS is unacceptable. Period.”

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said Trump’s “moral authority is compromised”.

Trump, who is known to try to change the focus of news coverage with an attention-grabbing declaration, sought to shift on Thursday from the white supremacists to the future of statues. “You can’t change history, but you can learn from it,” he tweeted. “Robert E. Lee. Stonewall Jackson — who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish.

“Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”

“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” he tweeted.

Trump met separately on Thursday at his golf club in nearby Bedminster with the administrator of the Small Business Administration and Florida governor Rick Scott, a longtime Trump supporter. Trump also prepared for an unusual meeting on Friday at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland with his national security team to discuss strategy for South Asia, including India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Vice President Mike Pence was cutting short a long-planned Latin America tour to attend the meeting.

Though out of public view, Trump sought to make his voice heard on Twitter as he found himself increasingly under siege and alone while fanning the controversy over race and politics toward a full-fledged national conflagration.

He dissolved two business councils on Wednesday after the CEO members began quitting, damaging his central campaign promise to be a business-savvy chief executive in the Oval Office.

And the White House said on Thursday that it was abandoning plans to form an infrastructure advisory council.

Two major charities, the Cleveland Clinic and the American Cancer Society, announced they are cancelling fundraisers scheduled for Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida, amid the continuing backlash over Trump’s remarks.

And the CEO of 21st Century Fox, James Murdoch, has denounced racism and terrorists while expressing concern over Trump’s statements.

Murdoch writes that the event in Charlottesville and Trump’s response is a concern for all people. “I can’t believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.”

Murdoch is the son of the company’s co-executive chairperson, Rupert Murdoch, a Trump confidant.

Meanwhile, rumblings of discontent from Trump’s staff grew so loud that the White House had to release a statement saying that Trump’s chief economic adviser wasn’t quitting. And the president remained on the receiving end of bipartisan criticism for his handling of the aftermath of the Charlottesville clashes.

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