Steve Bannon has been quoted as saying former President Donald Trump "would lie about anything" in a forthcoming book.
The quote by Bannon, a right-wing podcaster who served Trump as a chief strategist during the first seven months of his presidency, appears in The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020, a book by former MSNBC reporter and current Politico White House bureau chief Jonathan Lemire. The book is set for release on July 26 and an advance copy was obtained by The Guardian.
"Trump would say anything, he would lie about anything," Lemire quotes Bannon as telling aides, adding that he would do so "to win whatever exchange he [is] having at that moment."
In a 2018 ABC News interview, Bannon claimed to not know whether Trump hadn't always told the truth and called such claims "another thing to demonize him." A January 2021 report from the Washington Post found that Trump made over 30,000 "false or misleading claims" during his time in the White House.
"Entire campaign proposals had to be written on the fly, policy plans reverse engineered, teams of aides immediately mobilized to meet whatever floated through Trump's head in that moment to defend his record, put down a reporter, or change a chyron on CNN," Lemire's book continues after the quotes about Bannon.
Despite departing the Trump White House within a year, Bannon has remained within Trump's inner circle, notably getting involved in his attempts to undermine the 2020 presidential election and remain in power. A recently released audio clip from a few days prior to Election Day 2020 purports to show Bannon advising Trump to "just declare victory" no matter the results, which Trump went on to do as the results began to favor Joe Biden.
In the time since Trump left office, Bannon has remained a prominent booster of the former president's "Big Lie," insisting often that he won the 2020 election and that Biden's victory was the result of fraud. He has also made statements online calling former Vice President Mike Pence "Judas" for not attempting to decertify the election results on January 6, 2021.
Despite that position, Bannon also recently agreed to testify before the House Select Committee investigating January 6, with his attorney writing that he is "willing to, and indeed prefers, to testify at your public hearing." Some legal experts and pundits, however, have dismissed Bannon's potential testimony as a "gimmick" or a "ploy."
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Thomas Kika is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in upstate New York. His focus is reporting on crime and national ... Read more
