Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser to President Donald Trump, praise Chinese President Xi Jingping for giving a "adult" speech." | Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP Photo Bannon calls Bush, McCain speeches 'more pablum'

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon on Monday dismissed as "more pablum" recent speeches by former President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain that seemed to criticize President Donald Trump’s brand of politics.

The Breitbart News executive chairman contrasted the Republicans' addresses with a recent speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping, in which that leader vowed not to over-extend China's global reach.


“Last week in a span of I think 24 hours, we had the speech of President Xi, the speech of President Bush and the speech of Senator McCain,” Bannon said at a national security summit hosted by the Hudson Institute. “And I would respectfully submit that President Xi’s speech was an adult speech to adults and that President Bush and ... McCain’s speech was just more pablum.”

During a rare public address last week, the former president appeared to challenge Trumpism while urging U.S. voters to resist detractors of American democracy.

“Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” Bush said at the Bush Institute’s Spirit of Liberty event last Thursday in New York. The speech, during which Bush did not mention Trump by name, came just a month after a similar speech by former President Barack Obama in which he urged American leadership to step up to the challenges facing the U.S. government.

Later on the same day Bush spoke, McCain denounced the perils of what he called “spurious nationalism” during his acceptance speech for the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal. While McCain also did not directly cite Trump, the speech appeared to be in part directed at the man sitting in the Oval Office.

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems,” McCain said, “is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

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Pressed on the comments the following day, Trump struck back. “Yeah, well I hear it and people have to be careful because at some point I fight back. You know, I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back and it won’t be pretty,” the president told radio host Chris Plante.

