"When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind," President Donald Trump said of Steve Bannon. | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images Trump breaks with Bannon over explosive comments in forthcoming book The president, who told White House aides his former strategist is 'not well,' released a statement saying Bannon has nothing to do with his presidency.

President Donald Trump and his senior aides were fuming on Wednesday after the publication of a book excerpt containing a series of explosive comments from former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Trump ranted about Bannon in conversations with advisers on Wednesday, at one point telling aides he is “not well,” according to a person briefed on the conversations.


“Trump was livid,” this person said about his mood on Wednesday.

In a statement, the president bluntly disavowed his former top adviser, who was pushed out of the White House in August.

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,” Trump wrote. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

Bannon told journalist Michael Wolff that he viewed a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Russian operatives arranged by Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” according to a summary published by the Guardian.

The White House dismissed Wolff’s forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” as “filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence.”

“Participating in a book that can only be described as trashy tabloid fiction exposes their sad desperate attempts at relevancy,” said a statement released by press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

A statement accompanying an excerpt published Wednesday in New York Magazine said Wolff conducted more than 200 interviews over 18 months, and Wolff said he was given “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing.”

During Wednesday’s press briefing, Sanders the president was “disgusted” when he learned of Bannon’s comments.

Asked what the president is looking for from Bannon in the future, Sanders responded curtly. “I don’t think anything,” she said.

Sanders seemed unconcerned that the president’s attacks on Bannon could frustrate his base, which Bannon has courted as executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart News.

“The president’s base is very solid. It hasn’t changed because the president hasn’t changed and his agenda hasn’t changed,” she said.

The president has long leaned on Bannon for advice, both during the campaign and throughout his first year in the White House.

But people close to the president said Bannon was beginning to fall out of favor with Trump even before the latest revelations. Trump’s anger at his former adviser peaked last month when Vanity Fair published a lengthy profile of Bannon in which he bashed Kushner and Trump’s daughter Ivanka by name.

Bannon and Kushner have long had a tense relationship, and they frequently clashed when Bannon was in the White House. But Trump’s frustration with Bannon rose to new levels when his former adviser began publicly criticizing the president’s family, according to people familiar with the president’s thinking.

One person who spoke with the president in recent weeks said Trump told him he rarely talks to Bannon on the phone these days, adding they’ve only had a handful of substantial conversations since he left the White House in August.

Sanders said Bannon and Trump last spoke in December, adding that she is “not aware” of additional conversations between the two men on the president’s cell phone. She added that Trump and Wolff spoke briefly on the phone for five to seven minutes, but did not have a formal sit-down interview.

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Wolff also had a “roughly a dozen interactions” with White House officials, according to Sanders, who said the conversations were largely orchestrated by Bannon.

Bannon did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent months, Bannon hasn’t shied away from criticizing the White House, chiding the president for backing incumbent Sen. Luther Strange in the Alabama Senate Republican primary instead of Roy Moore, calling on Trump’s lawyers to take a harder line in Robert Mueller’s investigation and lamenting that the administration hasn’t taken a harder line on China.

Bannon has long had many detractors in Trump’s inner circle. And the president’s comments uncorked a wave of frustration among Trump’s advisers. Former Trump campaign officials also began quietly making the case to reporters that Bannon was a bit player in the campaign, in an apparent bid to cast him as an unreliable narrator.

But the efforts by White House aides and outside advisers to dismiss Bannon belie his deep influence on Trump both during the campaign and the early months of the presidency. The president spoke to Bannon multiple times a day when he was in the White House, and he often looked to Bannon for advice on policy and political issues.

Trump has publicly praised Bannon in recent months, even after he left the White House, calling him a “friend” who is committed to passing the administration’s agenda during remarks at an October meeting with his Cabinet secretaries.