opinion

Roberts: Trump-Bannon blowup cannot be good for Kelli Ward

So, it appears that President Donald Trump and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, are no longer besties.

I’m guessing Arizona Senate candidate Kelli Ward must be grinding her molars into nubs.

Ward has been chasing a Trump endorsement ever since she began her current campaign to replace Sen. Jeff Flake. (Which is not to be confused with her previous campaign to replace Sen. John McCain.)

She trumpets the MAGA master at every turn and was thrilled in August when Trump sent out an email saying it was “great to see” her running against the despised Flake.

Not that great, evidently. Ward didn’t even get a photo op with Trump when he came to Phoenix for a rally a few days later.

Snubbed by Trump, Ward courts Bannon

Still, Ward was positively giddy in October when Trump’s former chief strategist, Bannon, pronounced her one of his foot soldiers in his war against the Republican Party establishment. Never mind that he’d been forced out of the White House two months earlier in the wake of Charlottesville, when Trump equated the actions of white supremacists and neo-Nazis with the protesters who opposed them.

Bannon appeared at Ward’s kickoff rally, vowing that the party would “reap the whirlwind” and “that whirlwind is Kelli Ward.”

But the whirlwind has been unable to snag herself an endorsement from Trump.

MORE: Ward downplays her ties to Steve Bannon

In December, she went running down to Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where the president was vacationing, but still no endorsement. Instead, she got to “exchange pleasantries” with Trump.

Now comes a report that her champion, Bannon, described as “treasonous” a 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer supposedly offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Trump, as you might imagine, is not amused. On Wednesday, he said that Bannon “has nothing to do with me or my presidency” and that “when he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

What will Ward do with this albatross?

And what did he do after losing said mind? He endorsed Kelli Ward.

That’s going to leave a mark.

Ward immediately distanced herself from Bannon -- though interestingly she didn’t denounce his incendiary comments. Instead, she released a statement that Bannon is "only one of many high-profile endorsements". Yeah, the one she shared the stage with at her campaign kickoff.

All that Mercer money she was counting on as a result of being on the front lines of Bannon’s revolution? It just made like a tumbleweed and blew away as the Mercer family sided with Trump.

“My family and I have no communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements,” said Rebekah Mercer, daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer.

Ward has gone from the only person running against a highly unpopular Flake – one who had access to the Mercer ATM -- to now likely facing Rep. Martha McSally, a monster fundraiser and mainstream candidate who represents the party’s best hope of hanging onto what has long been a Republican Senate seat. (Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema awaits the winner of the GOP primary.)

Now Ward’s got an albatross by the name of Steve Bannon hanging around her neck. I can’t imagine that the lingering odor is going to draw her the endorsement she’s been chasing for a year – the one that quite likely would decide who wins the primary.

Can you imagine the big ol' smile on Martha McSally's face today?

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