Steve Bannon dressed down President Trump’s daughter Ivanka in the early days of the administration, reminding her that she was just another staffer in the White House.
“My daughter loves me as a dad,” Bannon told Ivanka, according to Howard Kurtz’s book, “Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press and the War Over the Truth.” “You love your dad. I get that. But you’re just another staffer who doesn’t know what you’re doing.”
And at one point, the president even took Bannon’s side when the then-top White House strategist accused the first daughter of leaking a story.
“‘Baby, I think Steve’s right here,’ Trump told her,” the book says, according to an excerpt obtained by the Washington Post.
The White House denied the portrayal.
“The past three weeks have made very clear who the leakers are,” the White House told the newspaper, referring to Bannon.
The former top West Wing staffer was a crucial source for another tell-all book that pulled the curtains back on Trump’s White House to show an administration in chaos.
In Michael Wolff’s best-seller, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” Bannon expressed his contempt for the president’s family, including his son Donald Jr., whom he called “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for meeting with Russians at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign.
He was quoted in the book referring to Ivanka as “dumb as a brick.”
The president quickly lashed out at Bannon, who left the White House in August 2017.
“When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump said.
In the resulting hubbub over his stinging comments, Bannon was removed from his perch at Breitbart News.
Like Wolff’s insider look at the White House, Kurtz’s book paints a portrait of aides struggling to respond to Trump’s offhand comments and tweets to his 47 million followers.
After a White House review of transgender people serving in the military, then-chief of staff Reince Priebus scheduled an Oval Office meeting in July 2017 with the president to go over his options.
But then Trump without warning tweeted that he would ban transgender people from serving in the military, upending an Obama administration decision.
“Oh my God, he just tweeted this,” Priebus said.
“There was no longer a need for the meeting,” Kurtz wrote in the book.
Kurtz also portrays Kellyanne Conway, counsel to the president, as a moderating influence.
When Trump wanted to send White House press secretary Sean Spicer into the briefing room to challenge estimates of crowd size at his inauguration the day before, she urged him not to do it.
“She invoked a line that she often employed when Trump was exercised over some slight,” according to Kurtz.
“‘You’re really big. That’s really small,'” she said.
Spicer did attack the media over the crowd size, an action that was widely ridiculed.
Afterward, Trump admitted he was wrong.
“You were right,” he told aides. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
Later, in defense of Spicer, Conway coined the term “alternative facts” to explain the discrepancy in crowd estimates.