‘The railhead of all bad decisions’: Steve Bannon blames ‘Javanka’ for missteps by Trump administration
It was Kushner who reportedly encouraged the president to fire FBI director James Comey, which Bannon called ‘the dumbest political decision in modern political history’
US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are under fresh scrutiny over their influence at the White House after a very public eruption of their feud with former chief strategist Steve Bannon.
In a gloves-off interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Bannon laid bare the mutual enmity with the senior advisers to the president, one of the worst-kept secrets of the Trump administration.
“The railhead of all bad decisions is the same railhead: Javanka,” he said, using a nickname that conflates the couple.
Bannon, who returned to rightwing site Breitbart News after being forced out of the White House in August, recalled an Oval Office meeting in which he accused Ivanka of being “the queen of leaks”. The first daughter allegedly retorted: “You’re a f****** liar!”
He also condemned Ivanka over her handling of the recent US Senate special election in Alabama, where Republican candidate Roy Moore denied accusations of sexual misconduct with teenagers. Ivanka said pointedly during the campaign: “There is a special place in hell for people who prey on children.”
The railhead of all bad decisions is the same railhead: Javanka
Bannon, who supported Moore despite the allegations only to see him lose the Republican heartland to a Democrat, responded in the Vanity Fair interview: “What about the allegations about her dad and that 13-year-old?” – a reference to an unproven allegation from a California woman that Trump raped her as a teenager (last year the woman dropped a lawsuit making the claim). Trump has faced multiple claims of sexual misconduct and denies all of them.