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Moran Hopeful Bannon Departure Will Bring Order To ‘Divisive’ White House

U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran speaks at a town hall meeting Friday in Topeka. News broke during the meeting that White House strategist Steve Bannon was leaving his job. (Photo by Jim McLean)
U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran speaks at a town hall meeting Friday in Topeka. News broke during the meeting that White House strategist Steve Bannon was leaving his job. (Photo by Jim McLean)

News of White House strategist Steve Bannon’s resignation broke Friday afternoon during U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran’s town hall meeting in Topeka.

The second-term Republican was fielding questions about President Donald Trump’s fitness for office when a man in the back of the American Legion hall reading the news on his cell phone shouted that Bannon was out

“We have breaking news during my town hall meeting,” Moran quipped as many in the crowd applauded.

In an interview after the meeting, Moran said he hoped that Bannon’s departure and the presence of a new chief of staff — former Marine Gen. John Kelly — would bring more order to what to date has been a relatively dysfunctional White House.

“I assume that the president made a decision that his administration will perform better in the absence of Steve Bannon, and I look forward to the administration coming together in a greater level of hope that the country will be less divided,” Moran said.

Moran, one of the few Republican members of Congress to earlier this week directly criticize the president for his ambivalent statements about last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Va., said infighting among Trump’s senior staff had made it difficult to work with the White House.

“We’ve seen the difficult times this White House has had in having a message and knowing what that message is and staying on that message,” he said. “We saw that with Charlottesville. We had three different statements and (it) was therefore hard to know exactly where the president was.”

Prior to joining Trump’s campaign a year ago, Bannon created a platform for the so-called “alt right,” a movement that includes white nationalists and other racist elements. 

Though he said he had never met Bannon, Moran said he had seen reports indicating he was leader of one of the warring factions that had created a “very divisive world at the White House.”

Jim McLean is managing director of the Kansas News Service, a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio and KMUW covering health, education and politics. You can reach him on Twitter @jmcleanks.

Jim McLean, Executive Editor of KHI News Service, oversees the KHI News Service. From 2005 until 2013, McLean coordinated all communications activities at KHI as Vice President for Public Affairs. The position he now occupies was created as part of a strategic initiative to solidify the editorial and operational independence of the KHI News Service. Prior to coming to KHI, McLean had a distinguished career as a journalist, serving as the news director and Statehouse bureau chief for Kansas Public Radio and a managing editor for the Topeka Capital-Journal. During his more than 20 years in Kansas journalism, McLean won numerous awards for journalistic excellence from the Kansas Press Association, regional chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Kansas Association of Broadcasters. In 1997, McLean and two Capital-Journal colleagues received the Burton W. Marvin News Enterprise Award from the University of Kansas William Allen White School of Journalism for a series of stories on the state’s business climate. McLean holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Washburn University.