White House infighting overshadows agenda ahead of Trump’s 100-day milestone
THERE is a civil war going on within the White House that is threatening to do serious damage to Donald Trump’s fledgling presidency.
YOU know you’ve lost control of a story when you wind up being portrayed as the Grim Reaper on Saturday Night Live.
That’s just how explosive the scandal of infighting within Donald Trump’s White House has become.
Reports have flooded out of Washington in recent weeks about a civil war going on between the President’s top two advisers: the grizzled anti-establishment firebrand Stephen Bannon and Mr Trump’s more moderate rich-kid son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The narrative has gathered so much steam that it ended up on the iconic US sketch show last weekend.
In the skit, Donald Trump — played in withering caricature by Alec Baldwin — chastises Bannon and Kushner for being “at each others throats”.
Bannon is portrayed as a sinister looking skeleton in a black cloak; while Kushner, played by guest host Jimmy Fallon, is depicted as a boy wonder, strutting into the Oval Office in a flak jacket and sunnies.
Trump pits the two against each other as the meeting descends into a scene from the President’s former reality TV show The Apprentice. (For the record, it’s Bannon who gets fired.)
As funny as the scene is, it reflects an issue that could do serious damage to Mr Trump’s fledgling presidency as it nears the crucial 100-day mark.
The gossip out of Washington is that Bannon, the 65-year-old conservative news baron, has fallen out of Trump’s favour and may even get the chop. With Bannon on the way down, Kushner, a 36-year-old millionaire married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, is on the way up.
Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace went so far as to call the rivalry between Bannon and Kushner a “Game of Thrones inside the White House”.
In the blue corner is Kushner, who was born into fortune and privilege, thanks to his multimillion-dollar family real estate empire, which he took over when his dad was jailed for tax evasion. He has degrees from Harvard and New York University, and is the former publisher of online magazine the New York Observer.
He has an absurdly broad brief in his role as senior adviser to the president, which includes standing in for Mr Trump at meetings with overseas leaders, fixing the US’s opioid crisis and reinventing the way the federal government is run. Oh, and he’s also been asked to bring about peace between Israel and Palestine, just in case he didn’t already have enough on his plate.
In the red corner is Bannon, who famously ran Trump’s campaign when Paul Manafort was dumped due to scandal. He has the similarly ill-defined role of chief strategist, despite having no experience in government or policy making, much like Kushner and most of Trump’s staff.
He is a savvy businessman, who initially made a killing from his investment in iconic sitcom Seinfeld. He has a master of business of administration from Harvard, formerly worked for top-flight investment bank Goldman Sachs and ran the far-right news and opinion site Breitbart, which championed Trump’s campaign. Vanity Fair describes Bannon as a “media bomb-thrower”; Time called him “the great manipulator”.
Stories of a rift within the White House began leaking around the time Trump kicked Bannon off the National Security Council earlier this month.
Bannon’s posting to the committee was seen as controversial because it elevated him to a chair usually reserved for the most senior military generals.
The allegation is that Kushner and Ivanka grew suspicious of Bannon when he placed himself on the committee, in what one insider described to Vanity Fair as a “dark-of-night operation”.
Bannon was also marked down for his botched implementation of the Muslim travel ban, which is still mired in legal obstruction.
The internal war became bloody earlier in the month when the Kushner and Bannon camps began planting unfavourable stories about each other in the press in tit-for-tat potshots.
The President was also reportedly none too pleased by Bannon’s attempts to “aggrandise himself at Mr Trump’s expense” in the media, The New York Times wrote.
TIME’s new cover: How Steve Bannon became the second most powerful man in the world https://t.co/EJpO6Qqg9K pic.twitter.com/BdpY4Hw9Xb
— TIME (@TIME) February 2, 2017
Despite reports of a ceasefire between the parties after Trump forced them to “work this out” at his Florida getaway Mar-a-Lago, it seems the damage to Bannon has been done and he has been marginalised in favour of Trump’s son-in-law.
The President’s dim view of Bannon was confirmed when he made this dismissive comment to the New York Post: “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late.
“I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve.
“I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.
“Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will.”
In picking over the entrails of the war, some reports examined where the aides’ offices are within the White House to assess their influence.
Kushner’s office is the closest to the power centre, separated from the Oval Office only by the President’s study and the White House dining room.
Bannon is one door further down the hall, close to the corner office of chief of staff Reince Priebus.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the reports of infighting were “overblown” and that the disagreement amounted to “healthy debate” that reflected the “diverse set of opinions” within Trump’s White House.
But the schism is a bad look for a president who is hyper-aware of his media image.
Next Saturday, Trump will mark his 100th day in office, which is seen as a crucial yardstick in assessing how a new president is performing.
Trump is already anticipating a bad report card, sending out a pre-emptive tweet on Friday, which predicted the media would eviscerate him.
No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S.C.), media will kill!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 21, 2017
It’s stories like this one that will make it very difficult for Trump to turn that perception around.
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