Newspaper & online reporters and analysts explore the cultural and news stories of the week, with photos frequently added by Esco20, and reveal their significance (with a slant towards Esco 20's opinions)
Steve Bannon was dramatically forced out of the White House on Friday in the latest earthquake to rock President Donald Trump's administration. Bannon leaves at the end of Friday amid competing claims over whether he was fired or quit on his own. But a senior administration official told DailyMail.com on Friday afternoon as the news rocketed around the world that Chief of Staff John Kelly(inset) made the decision and secured Trump's approval. The White House's official line is that it was a mutual decision that involved Bannon himself. 'White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve's last day,' a statement from press secretary Sarah Sanders read on Friday. 'We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.' The removal opens the way for a war waged by what one source called 'Bannon the Barbarian' on his West Wing enemies - the group he calls the 'globalists' which included Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, and Gary Cohn, Trump's chief economic adviser. NY TIMES The loss of Mr. Bannon, the right-wing nationalist who helped propel some of Mr. Trump’s campaign promises into policy reality, raises the potential for the president to face criticism from the conservative news media base that supported him over the past year. Mr. Bannon’s many critics bore down after the violence in Charlottesville. Outraged over Mr. Trump’s insistence that “both sides” were to blame for the violence that erupted at a white nationalist rally, leaving one woman dead, human rights activists demanded that the president fire so-called nationalists working in the West Wing. That group of hard-right populists in the White House is led by Mr. Bannon.
Mr. Bannon’s dismissal followed an Aug. 16 interview he initiated with a writer with whom he had never spoken, with the progressive publication The American Prospect. In it, Mr. Bannon mockingly played down the American military threat to North Korea as nonsensical: “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”
He also bad-mouthed his colleagues in the Trump administration, vowed to oust a diplomat at the State Department and mocked officials as “wetting themselves” over the consequences of radically changing trade policy.
TRUMP’S GOVERNMENTBy A.J. CHAVAR and CHRIS CIRILLO2:08The Days Before Bannon's Ousting
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The Days Before Bannon's Ousting
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s outgoing chief strategist, has been criticized as being emblematic of the far-right nationalism that turned violent in Virginia last weekend.
By A.J. CHAVAR and CHRIS CIRILLO on Publish DateAugust 14, 2017. Photo by Al Drago/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
Of the far right, he said, “These guys are a collection of clowns,” and he called it a “fringe element” of “losers.”
“We gotta help crush it,” he said in the interview, which people close to Mr. Bannon said he believed was off the record.
Privately, several White House officials said that Mr. Bannon appeared to be provoking Mr. Trump and that they did not see how the president could keep him on after the interview was published.
Mr. Bannon had made clear to allies after the American Prospect interview that he expected to be back soon at the right-wing website Breitbart.com that he had steered before joining Mr. Trump’s campaign. He had dinner in New York City on Wednesday night with Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire who is also Mr. Bannon’s chief patron, to discuss the future, according to a person briefed on the discussions.
