President Trump says he is not abandoning Stephen Bannon over the “bad rap” the White House chief strategist has gotten.
“[Bannon’s] a very decent guy,” he told Bloomberg News Monday.
“Bannon’s more of a libertarian than anything else, if you want to know the truth,” Trump added, calling Bannon “alt-left.”
{mosads}Trump’s remarks are an apparent play on the “alt-right” movement, which Bannon and his former employer, Breitbart News, are frequently associated with.
The president added that Bannon and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, have mended ties.
“Bannon is a very decent person who feels very strongly about the country,” Trump said. “Likewise, Jared. And they’re getting along fine.”
“We have a lot of people that are getting along well,” he said. “It’s coming out better now than it was, you know, for a while.
“And for a while it was a little testy, I guess, for some of them, but I said they’ve got to get their acts together.”
Trump last month declined to voice full confidence in Bannon, his election campaign’s CEO and the former chairman of the far-right Breitbart News, as reports alleged last month that the White House was in the middle of an internal fight between Bannon and Kushner.
“I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” he told The New York Post.
“I’m my own strategist, and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary [Clinton],” Trump added, referencing the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.
Bannon was removed from his spot on the National Security Council in April, leading to speculation that Trump was considering his ouster.