Steve Bannon Is Not the Only One Who Has "Lost His Mind"

It seems that President Trump is not the only one who can play hardball.

On January 3, roughly a week before author Michael Wolff's book, Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House, is released (it hits bookshelves January 9), several explosive quotes from former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon have hit the media and the outcome has led to Trump accusing Bannon of insanity.

“When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump said in a statement, according to Bloomberg and several other media outlets. “Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look.”

Certainly, the book's author has come under some fire in the past for work he's done on other books. According to Wikipedia, Wolff has received some criticism dating as far back as 2004, when writer Michelle Cottle of The New Republic stated that "the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created—springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events."

It is not unusual for authors to receive criticism of one stripe or another, and certainly, in writing about life in the White House under one of the most polarizing presidents and administrations in recent memory, Wolff will most certainly be facing a fair bit of it. That said, it would appear that there is some veracity to the Bannon quotes, as Trump's legal team has already served Bannon with a "cease and desist" notice for what was said in Fire And Fury, which has since hit #1 on Amazon before it's even been released.

Now, one might argue that mental instability might be something that the current president might have some familiarity with. One need only look at his Twitter feed, particularly over the last 24 to 48 hours, to realize that Trump's grip on reality might be a bit shaky at best. From tweets stating that his "nuclear button" was larger than Kim Jong-Un's (and worked - reading that on January 2 gave me chills, but in all honesty made me wonder if there wasn't a double entendre suggested) and a tweet that he was going to have an awards show about Fake News would certainly lead one to conclude that Trump is increasingly becoming more emotionally and mentally unstable. After all, the man is supposed to be president - one would figure that he would certainly have more important tasks on hand than to worry about so-called "fake news" or to tweet about his "bigger button."

His statements about Steve Bannon, though, might be the biggest indication of all that something is seriously amiss.

I'm relieved to know that Trump's access to whatever the United States has for nuclear armaments is not as easy as his pushing a button, per USA Today, but there's another war brewing on the horizon that has me curious.

The excerpts from Wolff's Fire And Fury suggest that Bannon knew full well what Trump and his family had exposed themselves to, and he was not very nice about his Trump family comments.

“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” he said of Donald Trump Jr and a possible future confrontation with Robert Mueller, according to Medialite.

Of the now-infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Jr on the 25th floor, Bannon suggests that the meeting was indeed treasonous and seems disbelieving that the group would not think to meet with lawyers present, as he suggests he would have done.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” he said. “But that’s the brain trust that they had.”

“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.”

It's amazing that Bannon has come out today and said that he still supports the president, but more amazing still that the American public does not yet know whether or not Robert Mueller, who is investigating the possibility of Russia having meddled in the 2016 election that saw Trump become president, has subpoenaed Bannon for any information he might have regarding the Russia-Trump connection.

Regardless of faults that might be found with Wolff's book by his critics - and let's face it, any author will have his or her fair share of those - the facts that Steve Bannon has not 1. made any statements questioning the veracity of the quotes attributed to him by Michael Wolff and 2. outright denied that he spoke with Wolff suggests that the quotes by Bannon are, indeed, legitimate.

If that is indeed the case, Special Counsel Mueller may very well find that there could be a motherlode of information that has yet to be tapped in Steve Bannon, regardless of the "cease and desist" that came from Trump's lawyers.