OPINION: This article contains commentary which may reflect the author’s opinion
During the Trump administration, Jared Kushner, an aide to former President Trump and Steve Bannon, also an aide, were engaged in battle with each other during their time in the White House.
Kushner, who is married to Trump’s daughter and fellow ex-White House aide Ivanka Trump, admits being put on the back foot by Bannon’s prodigious appetite for office politics and leaking damaging information to the media.
Bannon, who refers to himself as an “economic nationalist,” was especially intent on undermining Kushner and then-Treasury Secretary Gary Cohn, whom he saw as Wall Street insiders who would eventually damage Trump’s popularity with his MAGA base.
“He probably leaked and lied about me more than everyone else combined. He played dirty and dragged me into the mud.”
Kushner eventually won the West Wing “war” when Trump ousted Bannon as a White House political strategist.
Bannon was a chief executive officer in the Trump campaign in its final three months of 2016 and then White House chief strategist for seven months before leaving the Trump administration for a return to his former job at Brietbart News.
Then-President Trump fired Bannon from his position at the White House in 2017, thanking him with a tweet, “I want to thank Steve Bannon for his service. He came to the campaign during my run against crooked Hillary Clinton – it was great. Thanks, S.”
Rumors of Bannon’s departure from the White Hose were swirling in July 2017, when John Kelly was named to take over the job of chief strategist, including restructuring among the staff.
But Bannon sealed his fate with his interview with liberal journalist Robert Kuttner, in which he criticized rivals by name, contradicted policy of the President, and revealed his plans to shuffle State Department personnel.
Bannon later was quoted in the book, ” According to Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” making disparaging remarks about both Trump and his son-in-law.
When the book was released, then White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a written statement that the book was ” filled with false and misleading accounts’ and that Trump was “furious” at and “disgusted by” Bannon’s remarks.
She stated then,” going after the president’s son in an absolutely outrageous way is probably not the best way to curry favor with anybody.”
Jared Kushner, on the other hand, did not go after Bannon.
Bannon was charged in 2019 with duping thousands of doners who believed their money would be used to fulfill Trump’s chief campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border. Instead he diverted the money, some to himself, and was caught.
In the final hours before he left the White House in January, 2020, then-President Trump Pardoned Bannon of that crime, along with 140 other people including entertainers and ex-members of Congress, as well as those who had been serving time at length already.
Some were surprised that the President would pardon Bannon, but Trump did include him in the pardons that day.
Kushner reflects on the battle with Bannon now that time has passed.
He portrays himself as a benevolent winner because he green-lighted Trump’s pardon of Bannon for swindling donors to a private group claiming to build a wall on the border with Mexico.
After Bannon was pardoned by the President, more trouble came knocking.
Bannon was recently convicted of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee.
Bannon was found guilty for refusing to testify and provide documents that were requested, and will be sentenced on Oct 21.
Bannon is free until then as he awaits sentencing which could be up to two years in prison.
Benevolent is the right word for Kushner’s actions.
“Now that he was in trouble, I felt like helping him was the right thing to do,” Kushner writes, without explaining why it was “right” to give Bannon a get out of jail card.
In Kushner’s upcoming new book, “Breaking History: A White House Memoir” he relates many instances during the Trump administration’s White House tenure, and mentions the feud with Bannon.
Kushner is relating how intense the feud was between himself and Bannon, and that Bannon made violent threats to him while the two were on the same team.
The former presidential son-in-law portrays Bannon as a “toxic” presence in the West Wing who relished interoffice chaos in his forthcoming memoir “Breaking History,” Yahoo News reports.
“According to Kushner, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was a ‘toxic presence who accused him of undermining the President’s agenda and threatened to break him in half if Kushner turned on him.’” the book states, according to CNN.
“Jared, right now, you’re the one undermining the president’s agenda,” Bannon said, according to Kushner’s book. “And if you go against me, I will break you in half.”
“Don’t f— with me,” Bannon added, according to excerpts of the book revealed by CNN.
Source: The Republic Brief