The White House on Monday rejected an apology from President Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, blasting his comments in an explosive new book about the Trump White House as “repugnant” and “grotesque.”
“When you go after somebody’s family in the [manner] which he did, two of the president’s children are serving this nation, sacrificing in their service, it is repugnant, it is grotesque and I challenge anybody to go and talk about somebody’s family and see if that person doesn’t come back and comes back hard,” said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley.
“I don’t believe there is any way back for Mr. Bannon at this point,” Gidley told reporters on Air Force One as the president traveled to Tennessee for a speech. “I just don’t think there’s any way back.”
Bannon was a major voice in Michael Wolff’s behind-the-scenes look at Trump’s young presidency, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” which characterizes the president as clueless and his administration as incompetent.
When excerpts from the book first appeared last week, Trump said Bannon had “lost it.”
On Sunday, Bannon tried to bury the hatchet with Trump by expressing “regret” over his comments and referring to his son Donald Trump Jr. as a “patriot” and a “good man.”
He also disputed quotes attributed to him in the book calling Donald Jr. “treasonous” for meeting Russians at Trump Tower during the campaign in June 2016.
Bannon, in a statement to Axios, said that comment was directed at Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who attended the meeting with Donald Jr. and the president’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.
Bannon also said the president’s daughter made a deal with her husband — a couple he mocked as “Jarvanka” — that if one of them would run for president, it would be her because she wanted to be the country’s first female commander-in-chief.
“It is very obvious Mr. Bannon worked with Mr. Wolff in this particular book,” Gidley said, dismissing Bannon’s mea culpa. “The president has been very clear on his thoughts, issued a four-paragraph statement about Mr. Bannon. Zero ambiguity in those statements.”
He went on to call “Fire and Fury” “false and fake” and reiterated the president’s earlier comments that Bannon “is not in it for the country but instead in it for himself. And those statements still stand.”