NeverTrump Celebrates Donald Trump Attack on Steve Bannon

Members of NeverTrump — conservative pundits who said they would never vote for Donald Trump — are celebrating President Donald Trump’s attack Wednesday on Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon.

President Trump had issued a scathing statement Thursday in response to reports in the UK Guardian that Bannon had told author Michael Wolff that the meeting between Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Russian sources at Trump Tower in July 2016 was “unpatriotic” and “treasonous.”

Trump’s statement read, in part:

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.

Members of NeverTrump have long resented Bannon, and have sought to downplay his role in the campaign.

Some took the opportunity of Trump’s attack on Bannon to continue to trash President Trump himself:

In November 2016, in a statement announcing Bannon’s appointment as chief strategist in the White House, Trump said: “Steve [Bannon] and Reince [Priebus] are highly qualified leaders who worked well together on our campaign and led us to a historic victory. Now I will have them both with me in the White House as we work to make America great again.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.