POLITICAL WAR – AT 2:05 P.M. ET:  President Trump and his former political strategist Steve Bannon are now at war, and it is bound to become very ugly.  Trump clearly wants to destroy Bannon before Bannon destroys Trump.  From Bloomberg:   

President Donald Trump denounced his former top strategist, Steve Bannon, on Wednesday, saying that he “lost his mind” after leaving the White House last summer.

“When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump said of Bannon in a statement the White House issued. “Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look.”

The statement represented an emphatic break from the person considered the architect of Trump’s presidential campaign. Bannon continued to enjoy access to the president after he left the White House, but that has ended, one person familiar with the matter said.

Earlier on Wednesday, New York Magazine published excerpts of a forthcoming book by author Michael Wolff in which Bannon criticizes Trump’s campaign as well as the president and his family.

The Guardian published excerpts of the book in which Bannon predicts that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will “crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV” over the president’s son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016.

Bannon also called Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with the lawyer, in which he expected to receive damaging information on Trump’s election opponent Hillary Clinton, “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” according to the Guardian.

COMMENT:  This is not fun.  Other presidential advisers have split with their man in the Oval Office, but this split seems especially bitter and mean-spirited.

Stop it guys,  You're hurting yourselves, the country, and the party.  You're starting to sound like Democrats, which is not a compliment.

January 3,  2018