Spicer calls reports of White House infighting ‘overblown’

Reports of infighting among high-level staff members in Donald Trump's White House are “overblown,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Monday.

Despite an assertion from Trump himself that his administration was “running like a fine-tuned machine,” reports of feuding between top White House advisers, namely chief strategist Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, have proliferated. The two top aides spoke over the weekend at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for a bury-the-hatchet meeting ordered by the president.


“There's a lot of stuff that was overblown about this, that makes it out into the media sometimes and gets a little bit more sensational than it truly is,” Spicer said at his Monday news briefing, adding that Trump "recognizes that sometimes some of this spills over, these policy differences and discussions and he's made sure that it the focus stays on advancing the agenda.”

The press secretary said Trump values “a diverse set of opinions” in his White House staff and that “there is always going to be a healthy debate internally” on an array of policy issues. Those disagreements, Spicer said, end when the president makes his decision.

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“He doesn’t want a monolithical kind of thought process going through the White House. He wants a diverse set of opinions. He is the decider,” Spicer said. “The idea isn't to have one set of thought and policy flowing through there. It's to give the president the best advice possible, but that once the president makes a decision, that the team is on board 100 percent to make sure that we do what's in the best interest of the country and fulfill the agenda that he’s laid out.”