trump. continues to go after gary cohn, jared kushner, they re all still in the white house and steve bannon was the one shown the door. how effective will breitbart be? how much of a voice is this website? it s a good question. before trump went into the white house, breitbart was quite effective at influencing republican politics at a congressional level. i think they were chiefly responsible, they and their group of allies in congress, for ousting former house speaker john boehner in 2015. now bannon is a larger figure in our politics and our culture, especially among grassroots conservatives now that he s been in the white house and helped trump beat hillary clinton. so i think returning to breitbart is going to give him a new-found stature. i don t know if it will be enough to influence policy debates like the ongoing issue of troop levels in afghanistan, which was one of the major fights that bannon had with
that he would return to the alt-right news outlet brig breitbart. and he said, quote, the trump presidency that we fought for and won is over. now bannon went on to say in many ways i think i could be more effective fighting from the outside for the agenda of the president trump ran on. this is all coming as the president continued this week to blame both sides for the violence that we all reported on from charlottesville. kelly o donnell is standing by in new jersey. this is where the president is nearing the end of the 17-day working vacation. and kelly, we all know after a long vacation, we ve had a couple of weeks off and the weekend before the monday and we dread going back to work. but we have the president being active on social media today. but it is a new west wing. literally in some ways that he returns to on monday. reporter: yes, the construction project which was quite substantial including refinishing the floors and other
influence in the ousting of steve ban non. i think it may have as much to do with john kelly and his ascension to the chief of staff roll as anything else. you know it is interesting you bring up murdoch, now bannon is outside of the white house, but as kirk or anyone would tell you donald trump has a cell phone he can continue talking to steve bannon. donald trump is terribly undisciplined. he will continue to go around the efforts of his aides to funnel information to him. steve bannon could be as much of a influence on the outside as he is on the inside. at the same time directing the machinery of breitbart against these sort of mainstream republican politician that s are
donald trump has sometimes blown hot and blown cold about various people. priebus has been up and down, bannon was very up and then had the fatal mistake where he was on the cover of time magazine. you don t want to steal the spotlight from the boss. he was out of favor for a while. now bannon seems to be in okay shape. so who is to say oftentimes yes, you think you re in a position where you said something has to give in a normal organization, a normal white house, especially that would be true, but not necessarily in this white house. shepard: are they getting anything done? they re getting some things done, particularly on deregulations, executive orders. precious little on regulations. we ve seen two major defeats for the president this week. the biggest one we know about, of course, is healthcare, which you spent the first part of the show talking about to coming down to a stinging defeat in the
it s not like europe is going to remain stagnant. they were concerned that china would step into this void. we have to go, andrea. really quickly, does this is this any indication that tillerson and this strong team has to get through bannon first? yes. and initially tillerson, one of the reasons i believe he held back from us and the press corps and not wanting to do briefings, he wanted to figure out his moorings, develop a relationship with a president he did not know and make sure he was not being sidelined by the bannons and flynns. flynn is gone. he thought bannon was taken down from the national security council and he and others, obviously mcmaster and mattis, had this concord. now bannon is coming in from the inside and i think they ve got a whole new challenge. he has to figure out his relationship with president bannon. andrea mitchell, thank you very much. we ll go back live to keir