Steve Bannon's job has never been in more jeopardy, sources say
The next White House staff shake-up could leave Steve Bannon on the outside.
Sources told CBS News President Trump's chief political strategist may soon be gone.
The former executive chairman of Breitbart News helped Mr. Trump win the presidency, but his future is at risk because the president's new chief of staff is working to restore order in the West Wing.
Several high-placed sources inside and outside the White House told CBS News that Bannon has never been in more jeopardy, and one well-placed source said he could be gone by the end of this week, CBS News chief White House correspondent Major Garrett reports. Trump did nothing to quash that uncertainty in statements at Trump Tower Tuesday afternoon.
"Well we'll see – look like, I like Mr. Bannon, he's a friend of mine, but Mr. Bannon came on very late, you know that," Mr. Trump said. "I went through 17 senators, governors, and I won all the primaries. Mr. Bannon came on very much later than that, and I like him, he is a good man, he is not a racist, I can tell you that. He's a good person. He actually gets a very unfair press in that regard, but we'll see what happens with Mr. Bannon, but he's a good person, and I think the press treats him frankly very unfairly."
Bannon's stock has risen and fallen like other senior White House officials, and he has survived job scares before.
His close, personal relationship with the president can't be ruled out, but his fate is the topic of intense internal discussions involving the president and inside and outside adivsers, in part because of Bannon's history of clashing with members of the national security team as well as top economic advisers.
He's also accused of using his allies in the conservative media to try to undermine H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser.
The new chief of staff at the White House, retired four-star Marine Gen. John Kelly, is trying to eliminate that kind of open, factional warfare within the White House, and he has also tried to strengthen McMaster's position within the White House.
There's an ideological dimension to this as well: Bannon's hard-right, nationalist economic perspective and his reluctance to engage or expand military operations makes him clash with comparatively more moderate voices in the White House.
In the end, this could come down to the president's newly forged relationship with Kelly. Several sources told CBS News that Kelly wants "more adults" in the White House, and where Bannon falls on Kelly's estimation of adult or not adult could decide his fate.