Bannon on Trump Resistance in New York Times Op-ed: ‘This Is a Coup’

The former White House strategist drew a parallel between Trump's crises and that faced by US President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War in the 19th century.

Bannon devoted much of an interview with Reuters in Italy to making remarks about an anonymous op-ed column in the New York Times claiming that there is a resistance movement within the president's White House and administration, labeling it a “coup.”

READ MORE: Guessing Game: WikiLeaks Tries to Figure Out White House Insider Amid Op-Ed Row

“What you saw the other day was as serious as it can get. This is a direct attack on the institutions. This is a coup, okay." Bannon said, cited by Reuters.

The New York Times anonymous op-ed column was published on Wednesday, and was claimed to have been written by a Trump administration official who blasted the US president for his consistent “amorality” while claiming that some White House officials “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Bannon made an allusion to the last time a US president had been disrupted at the same level; when General George B. McClellan challenged President Lincoln’s authority to run the country during the brutal US Civil War.

“The country has only ever had such a crisis in the summer of 1862 when General McClellan and the senior generals, all Democrats in the Union army, deemed that Abraham Lincoln was not fit and not competent to be commander in chief,” Bannon asserted.

US President Abraham Lincoln, who has been referred to by many, including Trump, as “Honest Abe,” was the first president from the Republican Part to be elected and has often been cited by historians as one of the most respected and successful US presidents. Lincoln ended slavery in America and his party, his generals and his voters won the civil war. McClellan was demoted in November 1862 and lost as the Democratic nominee to Lincoln during the elections of 1864.

Bannon, after being fired by Trump, nonetheless mentioned the “Republican establishment,” which he accused in a 2017 interview of attempting to nullify the results of the 2016 presidential election.

“There is a cabal of Republican establishment figures who believe Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. This is a crisis,” the former hedge-fund manager and erstwhile movie producer declared. “I am not a conspiracy guy," he added, "I have said there is no deep state. It is an in-your-face state.”

Bannon remarked that the Democrats and independent politician Bernie Sanders should not enjoy the publication of the New York Times op-ed. “Don’t think it will be any different if you take power. Because this is the established order dictating that they know better than the people,” he claimed.

The author of the op-ed column remains unidentified, although previous reports have noted that Trump is "obsessed" with finding who it could be, and has narrowed down his list to "four-five persons." The US president also went out on a limb to demand that US Attorney General Jeff Sessions investigate the publication of the op-ed as a matter of “national security.”