Trump Says Bannon’s Staying Put As White House Strategist

Image by Nadav Kander / Time Magazine

By Daniel J. Solomon May 2, 2017

President Trump has decided to pull Steve Bannon out from under the bus, signaling in a Tuesday interview that he will be keeping on his chief strategist, who seemed for the past month to be on the ropes.

“Bannon is a very decent guy who feels very strongly about the country. Likewise, Jared. And they’re getting along fine,” Trump said in a talk with Bloomberg, saying that infighting between Bannon and sometime nemesis Jared Kushner had subsided.

He also described Bannon as “alt-left,” a twist on the charge that some have leveled at Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, that he backs the racist “alt-right” movement. Bannon has previously said that he turned Breitbart into “the platform for the alt-right.”

The new words from Trump represent a change from last month, when he coolly referred to Bannon as a “guy who works for me” and removed him from the important National Security Council.

In his interview with Bloomberg, Trump also predicted that other high-profile administration figures, like Press Secretary Sean Spicer, counselor Kellyanne Conway and Chief of Staff Reince Preibus, would still be in their offices several months from now.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

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