STEVE BANNON REMOVED FROM WHIE HOUSE
Ben Jacobs
August 18, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - Steve Bannon is out as White House chief strategist, a source has told the Guardian, ending his highly contentious career at the center of the Trump administration.
Multiple news reports confirmed his departure, attributing the information to senior administration sources.
Reports from multiple outlets on Friday stated that Donald Trump had decided to remove Bannon but that the White House was trying to work out the details. A Trump ally told the Guardian that the leaks about Bannon’s fate were part of an effort to pressure the White House aide to step down. “They are trying to get him to quit,” the source said.
Minutes later, the Guardian learned that Bannon was out.
The removal of the former Breitbart editor as Trump’s chief strategist marks a remarkable rise and fall for a rightwing ideologue regarded by some as the power behind the throne.
Bannon had retreated from the limelight in recent months, after bearing much of the blame for the failure of the president’s initial travel ban and amid speculation that his increased profile had drawn Trump’s ire.
But a bizarre interview that Bannon gave to the liberal magazine the American Prospect – in which he claimed there was no military solution for North Korea, called the far right a “collection of clowns”, and said the left’s focus on racism would allow him to “crush the Democrats” – may have altered the balance of the power inside the West Wing. For an aide long suspected of leaking freely about rivals, Bannon’s excuse that he thought the call was off the record was not helpful.
Bannon’s departure leaves a major void in the White House, depriving it of a man seen by some as Cardinal Richelieu in cargo pants, an unkempt schemer adept at manipulating the president, who was famously depicted as a childlike naif to his aide’s Grim Reaper in a Saturday Night Live sketch. The characterization – summed up in a Time magazine cover that hailed “the great manipulator” – reportedly annoyed the famously thin-skinned president.
Josh Green, the author of the book Devil’s Bargain about Bannon and Trump, told the Guardian: “Bannon may be the only person in the White House with clear and distinct politics of his own.”
His absence means more power and influence for figures such as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and the national economic council chair, Gary Cohn, who have few, if any, ideological ties to the Republican party and the conservative movement.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47645.htm