Steve Bannon, a former White House advisor under the Trump administration, previously insisted that former President Donald Trump does not lie. However, one of his quotes included in Jonathan Lemire's new book, "The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020," suggests otherwise.
According to The Guardian, the title of Lemire's book is in reference to Trump's dubious claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen; claims Bannon and other Trump allies also supported and regurgitated. Those claims subsequently influenced the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol where Trump supporters stormed the federal building in hopes of stopping the certification of President Joe Biden's victory.
Although The Washington Post previously published a document highlighting 30,573 times Trump lied while in office, Bannon made headlines back in 2018 when he argued that he did not lie.
During the interview, Bannon was told that the former president "has not always told the truth." Bannon pushed back saying, "I don't know that" as he dismissed the claims saying they were "another thing to demonize him."
ABC News' Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl asked Bannon, "The president's never lied?" to which Bannon replied, "Not to my knowledge, no."
However, Lemire wrote that "even for Bannon, Trump was something new. The chief strategist told me that Trump 'was not looking to win a news cycle, he was looking to win a news moment, a news second.'"
"An at-times shell-shocked Bannon would relay to aides that 'Trump would say anything, he would lie about anything to win that moment, to win whatever exchange he was having at that moment.'
"Entire campaign proposals had to be written on the fly, policy plans reverse engineered, teams of aides immediately mobilised to meet whatever floated through Trump's head in that moment to defend his record, put down a reporter, or change a chyron on CNN."
Lemire's new book will be released on July 26.
