US President Donald Trump with his chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Credit:AP "The President made up his mind on it over the past couple of weeks," the source said. Kelly had been evaluating Bannon's role within the White House. "They gave him an opportunity to step down knowing that he was going to be forced to," the source said. He had told friends he could go back to the right-wing Breitbart News outlet, which he had headed before he took over as chief of Trump's presidential campaign in August 2016.

Steve Bannon helped propel Donald Trump to the White House. Credit:Bloomberg Reports earlier in the day suggested Trump had already decided he would remove Bannon, and that the President and senior White House officials were debating when and how to announced it. One person close to Bannon insisted the parting of ways was his idea, and that he had submitted his resignation to the president on August 7, with the announcement shelved in the wake of the racial unrest in Charlottesville. Power struggle: White House senior advisers Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon. Credit:Andrew Harnik Bannon had clashed for months with other senior West Wing advisers and members of the President's family.

But the loss of Bannon, the right-wing nationalist who helped propel some of Trump's campaign promises into policy reality, raises the potential for the President to face criticism from the conservative media base that supported him over the past year. Bannon's many critics bore down after the violence in Charlottesville. Outraged over Trump's insistence that "both sides" were to blame for the violence that erupted at a white nationalist rally, leaving one woman dead, human rights activists demanded that the president fire nationalists working in the West Wing. That group of hard-right populists in the White House is led by Bannon. On Tuesday at Trump Tower in New York, Trump refused to guarantee Bannon's job security but defended him as "not a racist" and "a friend." "We'll see what happens with Mr Bannon," Trump said. Bannon's dismissal followed an August 16 interview he initiated with a writer with whom he had never spoken, with the progressive publication The American Prospect.

In it, Bannon mockingly played down the US military threat to North Korea as nonsensical: "Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about, there's no military solution here, they got us." He also bad-mouthed his colleagues in the Trump administration, vowed to oust a female diplomat at the State Department and mocked officials as "wetting themselves" over the consequences of radically changing trade policy. Of the far right, he said, "These guys are a collection of clowns," and he called it a "fringe element" of "losers." "We gotta help crush it," he said in the interview, which people close to Bannon said he believed was off the record. Bannon's departure was long rumoured in Washington. The President's new chief of staff, Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was brought on for his ability to organise a chaotic staff, was said to have grown weary of the chief strategist's long-running feud with Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser.

Bannon had been aligned with Kelly's predecessor, Reince Priebus, who was forced out in late July. More significantly, Bannon has been in a battle with Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law and senior adviser, since the spring. Bannon, whose campaign against "globalists" was a hallmark of his tenure steering the right-wing Breitbart website, and Kushner had been allies throughout the transition process and through the beginning of the administration. But their alliance ruptured as Trump elevated the roles of Gary Cohn, his top economic policy adviser and a former official at Goldman Sachs, and Dina Powell, a former Bush administration official who also worked on Wall Street. Loading Cohn is a registered Democrat, and both he and Powell have been denounced by conservative media outlets as being antithetical to Trump's populist message.

Reuters, The New York Times