When former U.N. ambassador John Bolton complained that “staff changes in the White House” have made it impossible for him to present his views to the president, most took it as a sign of Chief of Staff’s John Kelly policy to control access to Trump.
But Mike Cernovich, author of the Trump Dispatches blog and a known promoter of White House conspiracy theories, has taken Bolton’s complaint literally. In an interview with Breitbart News, the right-wing website now headed again by ousted Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Cernovich said he had inquired with White House insiders and concluded that Trump is “on house arrest” in his own home.
Breitbart’s editor in chief Alex Marlow, who interviewed Cernovich, weighed in, naming Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump as among those responsible for Trump’s forced isolation.
“You’ve got Kushner, you’ve got Ivanka Trump, Gary Cohn, Dinah Powell, H.R. McMaster,” he said. “And it’s just overwhelming and now with no Bannon and with no Gorka, just where is the President getting information that can tie him, connect him to his own base?”
Cernovich singled out Kelly for shutting out Trump and for allegedly taking away his phone, to which Marlow responded: “Coup is a strong word, but it’s very hard to argue against it at this point.”
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com or on Twitter @nathanguttman
Have Jared And Ivanka Put Trump ‘On House Arrest’?
Author
Nathan Guttman
Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.