But, in the end, none of these proclamations may be true. A person familiar with Bannon’s thinking told me that he remains profoundly misunderstood. He isn’t so much an ideologue, this person said, as a deal-maker; like his famous boss, he is willing to compromise. “People try and put him in a box to say he’s a political consultant when he really is a media executive,” this person said. This person went on to put some distance between Bannon and the Breitbart audience he is seen to represent in the West Wing. “I’m not saying he doesn’t agree with Breitbart; he does. He doesn’t agree with 100 percent of what’s there.” But, this person added, “he’s an executive first.” Another person close to Bannon suggested that it was unlikely that he was going anywhere anytime soon. “The guy does not quit,” this person said. “I don’t think he’s going to quit.” David Bossie, Trump’s former deputy campaign manager, put it to me more bluntly. “Steve is part of the team. He was part of the team during the campaign. He is part of the team now. It is not about Steve. It is about the ideas that elected Donald Trump.”…
The question that remains, however, is how much the president wants Bannon and Kushner to make peace. He has told them to do so and they reportedly did just that in Mar-a-Lago about a week ago. But those exhortations don’t seem to have quelled the backroom infighting. The person familiar with Bannon’s thinking told me on Friday that “the team is working well together,” but that sounded somewhat aspirational.
The person close to Bannon added, “Jared and Ivanka, do they want to be responsible for the day-to-day management of the federal government? No. They want to be prince and princess. That’s great! They’d be good at that. They want to be in the photo ops and they don’t want to be there doing crisis management. And that’s the point.” This person continued: “Leave the governance to Bannon and get Bannon a competent partner. By the way, he will never ask for that. He’s just too loyal a soldier.” (One White House aide patently rejected this characterization and pointed to Kushner’s expanding portfolio—such as his newly created S.W.AT. team, and his recent trip to Iraq—in defense of his work ethic and accomplishments.)
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