JOHN KELLY/STEVE BANNON/TRUMP PEOPLE: “John F. Kelly, the new White House chief of staff, told Stephen K. Bannon in late July that he needed to go: No need for it to get messy, Mr. Kelly told Mr. Bannon, according to several people with firsthand knowledge of the exchange. The two worked out a mutually amicable departure date for mid-August, with President Trump’s blessing.
But as Mr. Trump struggled last week to contain a growing public furor over his response to a deadly, race-fueled melee in Virginia, Mr. Bannon clashed with Mr. Kelly over how the president should respond. Give no ground to your critics, Mr. Bannon urged the president, with characteristic truculence…
By Thursday [8-17-17], after Mr. Bannon undercut American policy toward North Korea in an interview published by a left-leaning magazine, Mr. Trump himself had concluded that Mr. Bannon was too much of a liability.
By Friday, when he was forced from his job as Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Mr. Bannon had found himself wholly isolated inside a White House where he once operated with such autonomy that he reported only to the president himself.
This account is based on interviews with a dozen White House aides, associates of the president’s and friends of Mr. Bannon’s.”
-Jeremy W. Peters and Maggie Haberman, “Bannon Was Set for a Graceful Exit. Then Came Charlottesville.,” The New York Times online, Aug. 20, 2017