President Trump is said to be furious over chief White House strategist Steve Bannon's habit of taking credit for his 2016 election.
In 'Devil's Bargain,' a book by Joshua Green published last month, Bannon is painted as the mastermind behind Trump's ascendancy.
And the president is not pleased.
'That f***ing Steve Bannon [is] taking credit for my election,' Trump recently told a confidant, according to the left-leaning Buzzfeed website.
The book is a look-back on Bannon's role in leveraging Trump's connection with his base last year as his populist economic message attracted middle-class white voters.
Trump took pains to avoid backing him too firmly during a press conference on Tuesday, referring to him only as 'Mr. Bannon' while defending him against charges of bigotry.
'He is not a racist. I can tell you that. He is a good person. He actually gets a very unfair press in that regard,' Trump said in response to a question about whether he'll keep him.
'We'll see what happens with Mr. Bannon. He is a good person and I think the press treats him, frankly, very unfairly.'
A White House aide told Buzzfeed that 'the president is not happy with the Joshua Green book. Every other page is a love letter to Steve Bannon.'
Bannon joined the Trump campaign after the president had secured the GOP nomination.
It remains to be seen whether Bannon's fate will align with those of ousted White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former press secretary Sean Spicer, who had on-again, off-again relationships with Trump's public approval before departing the administration under criticism from conservatives who lost patience with the Republican Party moderates.
Now it's conservatives who are backing Bannon, frustrated that a stone-tough populist economic movement could devolve into a garden variety Republican administration.
'If Bannon is fired, this Republican White House, which is supposed to be nationalist conservative, would be fully staffed by generals, Democrats, Clinton voters and the occasional Bush aide,' a Bannon ally said.
'What is this, the Twilight Zone?'p class="mol-para-with-font">Bannon has continued to signal that the president must keep his ties to his base strong, and to mock Democrats for creating distracting news cycles about race relations in America.
'This past election, the Democrats used every personal attack, including charges of racism, against President Trump. He then won a landslide victory on a straightforward platform of economic nationalism,' Bannon told The Washington Post on Thursday.
'As long as the Democrats fail to understand this, they will continue to lose. But leftist elites do not value history, so why would they learn from history?'
Trump has gone out of his way to distance himself from a media narrative that credits his inner circle, and not the president himself, for his election triumph.
'I love reading about all of the "geniuses" who were so instrumental in my election success. Problem is, most don't exist,' he tweeted last month.
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