Steve Bannon out at White House
Posted By Garth Kant On 08/18/2017
WASHINGTON — It’s official: Stephen Bannon is leaving the White House.
The exit of President Trump’s top adviser has been long rumored but it became a reality Friday when the White House press secretary issued this statement:
“White House Chief of Staff John 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.”
It was not clear whether Bannon resigned or was fired.
But he remained defiant and optimistic, telling WND earlier this week, “I have not yet begun to fight.”
A source told the New York Times the departure was Bannon’s idea and that he actually resigned on Aug. 7. The resignation was to be announced at the start of this week, but was reportedly delayed because of the raging controversy over Charlottesville.
However, CNN claimed a White House source said Bannon was fired, and was forced out after he refused to resign.
That source said Trump was going to fire Bannon two weeks ago but had second thoughts about firing him and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus at the same time.
The source also claimed that Trump was persuaded to keep Bannon by the influential chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and other conservatives.
But Meadows reportedly dropped his opposition to dumping Bannon after he gave a freewheeling interview to a left-leaning reporter earlier this week that flatly contradicted some of the president’s positions, such as the viability of a military option against North Korea, which his top adviser ridiculed.
On Friday, Matt Drudge, the founder of the influential website the Drudge Report, said Bannon “had one hell of a run.”
Drudge also speculated that Bannon might return to Breitbart News, which he ran as executive chair before joining the Trump presidential campaign.
Political observers considered Bannon instrumental in forming the anti-illegal immigration and anti-globalization strategies that helped elect the president.
Trump was said to chafe at that notion, because those were positions he held long before Bannon joined the 2016 election campaign.
But the president also recognized Bannon’s unique value to his success by creating the position of White House chief strategist especially for him, and making the man who had been his top campaign adviser his top presidential adviser.
Bannon, however, encountered significant opposition within the White House in his new role. He was often reported to have bitterly feuded behind the scenes with presidential advisers who did not share his policy goals.
The president’s top adviser is considered to represent the views of the GOP base voters who elected Trump, so jettisoning him has been seen as politically risky for the president.
But Bannon apparently became increasingly isolated in the White House as conservatives such as former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn were replaced by moderates such as his successor, H.R. McMaster.
Bannon has long been accused of racism and white nationalism by leftist critics who have provided no evidence that he has ever actually expressed or supported such views, merely citing the strong anti-illegal immigration stance of the former chief of Breitbart News.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., seemed to think Trump fired Bannon to deflect the intense criticism the president has received after accurately claiming, as demonstrated in video footage, that both far-right and far-left groups were responsible for violence that turned deadly last weekend in Charlottesville.
Pelosi tweeted: “Steve Bannon’s exit does not erase @realDonaldTrump’s long record of lifting up racist viewpoints & advancing repulsive policies.”
However, Pelosi has been finding racism in unlikely places, issuing a confused call for the National Park Service to revoke a permit for what she called a “white supremacist rally” set for late August in San Francisco.
It’s actually a prayer rally.
Joey Gibson, the organizer of the “Patriot Prayer” rally, pointed out that not only is it not a white supremacist rally, he himself is not white.
“We have about eight speakers and only one speaker is white. We have a couple black speakers, a hispanic (speaker), we have a transexual speaker, we have a woman speaker, it’s very diverse,” Gibson told a San Francisco paper.
“It’s frustrating because right now we have these politicians who believe it is OK to lie, you know we let them get away with it. She’s going to make such a ridiculous lie, like even the fact that I’m brown, she’s going to say that I’m a white supremacist,” he added.
“You know what she’s doing,” Gibson continued, “she’s making it more dangerous for San Francisco. She’s trying to rile up her citizens so that they come down there and try to chase us out. She’s using that rhetoric. It’s just going to cause more violence and put more people in danger.”
Developing story ~
http://www.wnd.com/2017/08/steve-ban...white-house-2/