Ousted presidential adviser Steve Bannon is jumping into the Donald Trump/Elon Musk fray, defending the president and publicly stating on Politico’s Playbook podcast that he will rip Musk’s “f-----g face off.”
“You’re going to tell me we should allow some f-----g punk to sit there and say he should be impeached and J.D. [Vance] should step in? F--- you, dude. We’re going to go to f-----g war, and I’m going to rip your f-----g face off,” Bannon said during a broadcast on June 5.
Bannon, who was the chief executive officer for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and chief strategist and senior counselor to the president once Trump took office in his first term, was fired in August 2017 after months of clashes with others in the White House.
After a messy blow-up between Trump and Musk played out on their respective social media platforms — with Trump threatening to cut Musk’s government contracts and Musk posting claims that Trump is tied to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein — Bannon chimed in.
“The president treated him almost like a son,” Bannon told Playbook. “He invited his family to Christmas dinner. He let him sleep over. He let him walk in and out of meetings. The president went to the max informality to welcome this guy.”
Bannon’s comments seemed to intensify the messy, week-long feud, which began when the tech billionaire slammed Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” as a “disgusting abomination.”
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote in his original post on X on June 3, calling it a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled” bill. “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
The comment came less than a week after the duo appeared together at the White House for a subdued goodbye, with Trump thanking Musk for his brief time in the U.S. government by handing him a symbolic golden key.
Trump clapped back on his own social media network: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.”
“This just gets better and better,” Musk replied on X. “Go ahead, make my day.”
Musk then said, without offering evidence of how he might know the information, that Trump was “in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
The feud ended a nearly year-long partnership between the two: Musk announced his stringent support for Trump shortly after the then-candidate was nearly assassinated on stage at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally last July. Musk soon became a close adviser and frequent companion, and when Trump was elected, the SpaceX, Tesla and X owner stood behind him as he took the oath of office.
And now, Bannon, who went to prison last year for refusing to testify in a congressional investigation of Trump, seems to be capitalizing on Musk’s downfall, speaking to multiple news agencies about the fallout.
“…he crossed the Rubicon by this outrageous comparison to the Epstein files about saying President Trump should be impeached, replaced by JD Vance,” Bannon told NPR. “This is so outrageous. It has crossed the line. He’s crossed the Rubicon and there’s no going back.”