Steve Bannon, head of Brietbart News and considered the architect of Trump’s campaign, made the remark to a friend in November 2017. Bannon also described the office as already having taken a toll on Trump, saying he believed the President had “lost a step.”
Bannon left his chief strategist role at the White House in August.
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster derided President Donald Trump’s intelligence at a private dinner with Oracle CEO Safra Catz, according to several sources with knowledge of the conversation.
Four sources told BuzzFeed News they heard about the incident from Catz. McMaster referred to Trump as an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner,”, according the the sources
Oracle and the Trump administration denied the comments that Catz later recounted.
In an interview with Time, Trump recalled the conversation.
I said, “You don’t use steam anymore for catapult?” “No sir.” I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”
It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said — and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said, “What system are you going to be—” “Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said, “No you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.”
At Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, a rally named Unite the Right was held to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Those in attendance included the KKK, neo-Confederates, and neo-Nazis. The organizer of the rally, Jason Kessler, was a self-avowed white supremacist and Neo-Nazi.
Unite the Right Rally. Wikipedia
On the second day of the rally, a white supremacist drove a car through a crowd of counter-protesters, injuring 28 people, and murdering Heather Heyer, a 32-year old woman. It was ruled a terror attack by the city and the FBI. A police helicopter responding to the events also crashed, resulting in the deaths of two Virginia state troopers.
When questioned about the rally, Trump remarked, “you have blame on both sides,” and “you had very fine people, on both sides.” He went on to say, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”
Trump gave a speech to law enforcement in Long Island, New York. He remarked,
“When you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, and I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.'”
After a July 20, 2017 meeting at the Pentagon, the New Yorker reported that then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson referred to Trump as “a f*cking moron.”
When asked about it, Tillerson said he wouldn’t be resigning, but also didn’t deny whether he’d said the remark.
After the report emerged, Trump publicly challenged his Secretary of State to an IQ test.
The sanctions were passed with a veto-proof majority because of Russian election interference in 2016. They followed sanctions passed in 2012 for human rights violations, called the Magnitsky Act.
