Donald Trump and Steve Bannon make their break-up official in nasty public spat

The bro­mance, or alliance of con­ve­nience, or what­ev­er you want to call it… is over. Pass the pop­corn; the for­mer mem­bers of Trump’s inner cir­cle are at war.

Trump essen­tial­ly excom­mu­ni­cat­ed his one­time chief strate­gist, Stephen K. Ban­non, from his polit­i­cal cir­cle on Wednes­day, exco­ri­at­ing him as a self-pro­mot­ing exag­ger­a­tor who had “very lit­tle to do with our his­toric vic­to­ry” and has now “lost his mind.”

In a writ­ten state­ment brim­ming with anger and resent­ment, Mr. Trump fired back at Mr. Ban­non, who had made caus­tic com­ments about the pres­i­dent and his fam­i­ly to the author of a new book about the Trump White House. While Mr. Ban­non had remained in touch with Mr. Trump even after being pushed out of the White House last sum­mer, the two now appear to have reached a break­ing point.

“Steve Ban­non has noth­ing to do with me or my pres­i­den­cy,” Mr. Trump said in the state­ment. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

Mr. Trump berat­ed Mr. Ban­non for the loss of a Sen­ate seat in Alaba­ma and said the for­mer advis­er did not rep­re­sent his base but was “only in it for him­self.” Rather than sup­port­ing the president’s agen­da to “make Amer­i­ca great again,” Mr. Ban­non was “sim­ply seek­ing to burn it all down,” Mr. Trump said.

“Steve pre­tends to be at war with the media, which he calls the oppo­si­tion par­ty, yet he spent his time at the White House leak­ing false infor­ma­tion to the media to make him­self seem far more impor­tant than he was,” he added. “It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meet­ing with me and only pre­tends to have had influ­ence to fool a few peo­ple with no access and no clue, whom he helped write pho­ny books.”

Read­ers, I’d like to draw your atten­tion to that last para­graph. I’m going to block­quote it again, because it’s so incredible:

“Steve pre­tends to be at war with the media, which he calls the oppo­si­tion par­ty, yet he spent his time at the White House leak­ing false infor­ma­tion to the media to make him­self seem far more impor­tant than he was,” he added. “It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meet­ing with me and only pre­tends to have had influ­ence to fool a few peo­ple with no access and no clue, whom he helped write pho­ny books.”

Let’s see… pre­tend­ing to be at war with the media… call­ing the media the oppo­si­tion par­ty… spend­ing time at the White House leak­ing false infor­ma­tion… manip­u­lat­ing peo­ple being one’s only real skill… writ­ing pho­ny books… gosh, does not that sound like the behav­ior of a cer­tain cur­rent occu­pant of 1600 Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue that we know? Why yes, yes it does!

Con­grat­u­la­tions, Don­ald Trump… you’ve just accused your for­mer chief strate­gist of being too much like you!

It cer­tain­ly takes a lot of chutz­pah and nar­cis­sism to attack a for­mer hench­man for the very same con­duct that one engages in themselves.

But then, Don­ald Trump has always been a glass house dweller who likes pro­ject­ing his sins and bad behav­iors onto oth­ers. It was arguably only a mat­ter of time before he turned on Ban­non, espe­cial­ly giv­en that Ban­non’s loy­al­ty is to him­self and his patrons Robert and Rebekah Mer­cer.… not to Trump.

Ban­non all but invit­ed Trump to attack him when he made a set of pub­lic dis­parag­ing com­ments about Don­ald Trump, Jr., which report­ed­ly enraged Trump.

“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on nation­al TV,” Ban­non is quot­ed as say­ing in Fire and Fury, a new book by Michael Wolff obtained by The Guardian.

Ban­non also referred to the meet­ing in the book as “trea­so­nous” and “unpa­tri­ot­ic”.

Wolf­f’s book is sup­pos­ed­ly based on more than two hun­dred inter­views with mem­bers of the Trump regime. Trump him­self was among those Wolff inter­viewed, although the regime now says Wolff only met briefly with Trump once.

Ban­non left Trump’s employ back in the sum­mer and went on to cham­pi­on Roy Moore’s los­ing cam­paign for the U.S. Sen­ate in Alaba­ma. Trump, fol­low­ing in the exam­ple of oth­er Repub­li­cans, is now blam­ing Ban­non for that fiasco.

While Ban­non makes a con­ve­nient scape­goat, it was the deci­sion of Trump and his remain­ing inner cir­cle to hitch their wag­on to Moore even after Mitch McConnell and Richard Shel­by had decid­ed to pull their sup­port from Moore’s cam­paign. They chose to fol­low Ban­non’s lead in the Decem­ber 12th runoff. Not to men­tion Trump’s choice of Jeff Ses­sions set up the spe­cial elec­tion in the first place.

The Trump regime is a sink­ing ship. Trump’s pres­i­den­cy is not a year old and already it ranks, in our view, as one of the worst ever, if not the worst. Trump and his regime can’t be gone soon enough. They’re a can­cer on the Unit­ed States of America.