HONG KONG—Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon speaks with President Donald Trump every two to three days, he told a private lunchtime gathering Tuesday in Hong Kong, some three weeks after the adviser left his administration job.

Mr. Bannon said he most recently spoke with Mr. Trump the previous night for an hour, according to two people who attended the closed-door meeting with the former presidential adviser. The gathering, at a Grand Hyatt hotel restaurant, included a group of about 20 money managers.

Mr. Bannon wasn’t immediately reachable for comment.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Tuesday she was aware of two conversations between Mr. Bannon and the president. Of the former chief strategist’s comment that the two speak every two to three days she said, “Certainly not that frequently.”

A summer of turmoil in the White House continued on Friday with the departure of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib examines how Bannon's departure impacts the balance of power within the Trump White House. Photo: Getty

When he worked in the administration, Mr. Bannon, a former investment banker and media executive, was associated with the president’s “America First” agenda and had pressed for more protectionist trade policies, restrictions on immigration and withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. Mr. Bannon joined Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign last summer and stayed on in the White House as chief strategist.


He left the administration last month and rejoined Breitbart News, a right-wing website, as executive chairman after a week in which the president came under fire for saying that both white supremacist groups and counterprotesters were to blame for racially charged unrest in Charlottesville, Va.

Mr. Bannon had supported the president’s defense of Confederate symbols in the days after the Charlottesville violence, in which an alleged white supremacist is charged with killing a woman by plowing his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.

Mr. Bannon at the Tuesday lunch described himself as a “schmendrick” engineer—invoking the Yiddish word for “foolish person”—while Mr. Trump was the architect of the campaign, the attendee said. Mr. Bannon said while he had influence before in the White House, he now has “power” at Breitbart.

On Tuesday evening, Mr. Bannon told an investment conference organized by financial-services firm CLSA, a unit of Chinese state-owned brokerage firm Citic Securities Co., that Mr. Trump’s relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping is very positive, three conference attendees said. The speech was closed to the media, and attendees said the room was packed.


Mr. Bannon said Mr. Trump has enormous respect for Mr. Xi and was confident something would get done on trade, the people in the room said. Mr. Bannon did say that China structures its economy to protect certain industries from capitalist ways and that the U.S. needs to play a stronger role changing the system in China, an attendee recalled.

While in the White House, Mr. Bannon was deeply involved with Mr. Trump’s tough talk on trade with China, and he told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview that aired this week that China was “at economic war” with the U.S.

In describing Asia more broadly, Mr. Bannon said the region is witnessing both a century of growth and also a century of conflict, according to attendees.

Mr. Bannon told the conference he doesn’t expect any U.S. tax-law changes for at least the next three months and that it probably wouldn’t happen until next year, according a person who was in the room. He also said he wants to be Mr. Trump’s “wingman” from outside the White House, another attendee recalled.


Write to Julie Steinberg at julie.steinberg@wsj.com and Steven Russolillo at steven.russolillo@wsj.com