You know how, when you break up with someone, you start thinking about the little things about them that always irritated you but you never said anything? Then, in conversations with other people, you bring those things up and spill all kinds of tea because, since y’all aren’t cool anymore, you may as well?
That is the situation between Donald Trump and his former chief strategist and campaign manager Steve Bannon right now, and it is the funniest thing ever.
In recent interviews, Bannon has been hypercritical of the president, his family and White House operations—and he has even mocked the president’s intellect, as if we all didn’t already know that Trump is not the brightest candle in the menorah.
Two weeks ago, a Vanity Fair profile of Bannon made your president turn the deepest shade of orange. (I don’t think he can turn red. He just goes from tangerine to, like, burnt sienna.) On Wednesday, excerpts of a book written by journalist Michael Wolff were published online—and according to the Washington Post, your president went ballistic.
Trump said in a statement:
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.
OK, so they are both delusional. Your president sounds completely unhinged and ridiculous. But wait. There’s more:
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. 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.
This is the part where we all collectively shake our heads and remind Trump that he wasn’t saying all of this while he and Bannon were in bed together. He wasn’t saying all of this when Bannon was helping him get the “alt-right” vote. He wasn’t saying all of this when Bannon and people associated with him were pandering to the white-nationalist-ideology portion of the president’s base.
But now that Bannon is coming out with the truth on some “Yo, this dude is dumb, B”-type ish, the president is up in arms and wants to question Bannon’s intelligence.
LOL.
Read more at the Washington Post.