From The Nation
It is absurd for the president to claim: "Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency."
President Trump this week told reporters that "Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency."
That is a lie.
When virtually every prominent Republican in Washington and across the country had abandoned Roy Moore, the disgraced Alabama jurist who stood accused of preying on teenage girls, Steve Bannon continued to back him. Then something remarkable happened: Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, did the same.
President Trump followed the man who he had named CEO of his presidential campaign; the "chief strategist and senior counselor" through his transition into the early stages of his presidency. Their alliance on behalf of the scandal-plagued Alabaman was so newsworthy that media outlets reported on it for days, with CBS announcing that: "Trump and Bannon double down on support for Roy Moore."
As he had before, Bannon formally joined his presidential campaign team in the summer of 2016, Trump was still -- by every evidence -- taking cues from the divisive nationalist thinker and propagandist for months after the Breitbart News executive left his position on the White House staff. When the Moore campaign was struggling following reports about his predatory past, "Trump, who hadn't weighed in, loomed as the ultimate determiner of the candidate's fate," noted Bloomberg News. "According to three people familiar with his actions, Bannon made calls to Trump and Nick Ayers, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, urging them to withhold public comment and let the people of Alabama decide whether Moore belonged in the Senate."
Even as the president's daughter, Ivanka Trump, was saying "there's a special place in hell for people who prey on children," the Daily Beast reported that: "According to two sources -- one a White House official and the other a Republican source close to both the White House and Bannon -- Bannon has spoken multiple times on the phone to President Trump since late last week. At least one of those calls was devoted to discouraging the president from rejecting or criticizing Moore in public statements."