Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon believed Donald Trump had dementia, and considered a covert plan to remove the president through the 25th Amendment, according to a new book from former 60 Minutes producer Ira Rosen.
“Bannon realised that Trump was repeating the same stories over and over again,” Mr Rosen told Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff in a podcast released on Tuesday. “There was a David Brooks column that had been written in the New York Times, that said Republican Senators went to see Trump in the White House, and they were hearing him repeat himself, and they realised he may be suffering from early stage dementia.
“Bannon kept saying this, and he wanted to do something about it.”
In the book, Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at “60 Minutes,” Mr Rosen writes he has text messages that prove Mr Bannon was seeking to remove the president, including one that read, “You need to do the 25th amendment piece. By the way brother I never steer you wrong.”
Mr Bannon; a defence attorney who recently represented him; and Performance One Media, which distributes his War Room podcast, all did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Independent.
In his book, Mr Rosen writes that president Trump and Mr Bannon’s relationship began to publicly fray when the media started shining a spotlight on the strategist’s role and seemed to upstage the president. He also alleges Mr Bannon was a gossip and a major source for tell-all books about the White House from journalists Bob Woodward and Michael Wolff.
Mr Bannon, the former executive chairman of the hard-right Breitbart News site, left the White House in August of 2017, amid clashes with other senior White House personnel like Mr Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.
The two apparently reconciled by the end of Mr Trump’s presidency, with Mr Bannon reportedly speaking to the president by phone in his administration’s final days about how to overturn the election results, and the former president pardoned Mr Bannon after he was charged with defrauding political donors who supported a private effort to build a Mexican border wall.
