Two MAGA gurus who helped Donald Trump get to the White House are at each other’s throats over a hotly contested Republican Senate primary.
“My belief is the Trump team should have stayed out of this race, absolutely,” Steve Bannon, who served as one of the president’s chief strategists on his 2016 campaign, told Politico’s Playbook newsletter Friday.
His comments come in the midst of incumbent Sen. John Cornyn’s tight contest against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Congressman Wesley Hunt for the GOP nomination ahead of the state’s midterm Senate race.
Bannon has backed Paxton, while strategist Chris LaCivita and pollster Tony Fabrizio, who both helped Trump secure his second term, have thrown their weight behind Cornyn.
“Associated with Senator Cornyn is better than being a lacky [sic] for Epstein,” LaCivita texted Politico in response to Bannon’s broadside.
Bannon has faced intense backlash after a Jan. 30 release of 3 million Justice Department files on the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein appeared to show extensive exchanges between the strategist and the disgraced financier.
The documents allegedly outline how the pair maintained a friendly relationship from around 2017 right up until Epstein’s 2019 arrest, with Bannon providing PR advice and even working on what seems to have been intended as a redemptive documentary about the convicted sex trafficker.
Signs of Bannon’s apparently vicious conflict with LaCivita come ahead of what promises to be a bruising battle for control of the House and Senate, historically a mid-point bellwether for any administration’s performance, given Trump’s approval rating currently hovers at a miserable 39 percent.
As far as the Texas GOP primary goes, the MAGA leader has so far given little indication of who he might back for the ticket, even as he’s scheduled for a rally appearance in the state later on Friday.
A White House official told Politico only that “the president is neutral until he’s not,” adding of LaCivita and Fabrizio’s backing of Cornyn that “we don’t regulate the business political/choices of private individuals.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for further comment on this story.
