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Steve Bannon To Trump: ‘Keep A Sh*t List’ Of GOP Healthcare Detractors

By Aric Mitchell
Published on: 09:20 PST, Mar 26, 2017

Steve Bannon, founding member of alt-right platform Breitbart News and current White House chief strategist, is telling the President to keep a “sh*t list” of the GOP House members, who opposed his efforts at passing an Obamacare repeal-and-replace.

The American Health Care Act (AHCA, aka “Trumpcare”) was pulled from the floor of the House moments before a crucial vote.

Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis) met with President Trump earlier in the day to inform him there were not enough votes to pass the legislation, handing the President his first major defeat only 70 days into his administration.

From the beginning, there were no Democratic votes, so it was crucial the GOP showed solidarity in passing the measure.

Unfortunately for Trump and Ryan, the 29-member “Freedom Caucus” of the Republican party refused to budge on the bill that Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky dubbed “ObamaCare Lite.”

Without their support, the legislation crumbled and, as Ryan pointed out Friday, ObamaCare will continue to be the law of the land “for the foreseeable future” (hat tip, The Hill).

Now a new report from the Daily Beast — quoting under cover of anonymity “several” senior Trump administration officials — states that Steve Bannon is on the war path.

The Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng reports the site has been in contact with multiple officials and the word is the same.

“[Steve Bannon] has told the president to keep a sh*t list on this,” one official told the news site. “He wants a running tally of [the Republicans] who want to sink this… Not sure if I’d call it an ‘enemies list,’ per se, but I wouldn’t want to be on it.”

According to Suebsaeng, two “senior Trump administration officials with direct knowledge of the process” said that Bannon, Trump, and others including Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for the White House and co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus, were supportive of the idea. The mentality, officials said, is “you’re either with us or against us.”

Steve Bannon, in particular, wants the tally of “against” versus “with us” in his West Wing “war room,” one of the anonymous officials claimed.

As Business Insider notes, this is not the first terse dialogue Bannon has had with the Freedom Caucus. Prior to the AHCA’s failure, he met with the GOPers to tell them they had “no choice” but to vote for the bill.

How the “sh*t list” manifests itself remains to be seen, but Trump did show signs on Sunday morning that he was ready to ease up on Democrats and start taking shots at the congressmen, who would not support the law.

In an early morning tweet, the President appeared to lay blame at the Freedom Caucus’s door, stating that “Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!”

And while Trump has yet to officially set his sights on Speaker of the House Ryan, with whom he has had a tense history (detailed here via New York Post), he did advise followers to watch Judge Jeanine Pirro’s Saturday night (March 25) program in which she opened with a call for the Speaker to step down — also a move that has been attributed to Steve Bannon.

Do you think Steve Bannon will really keep a “sh*t list” of GOP detractors? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Featured Image by Gage Skidmore/Wikipedia Commons/Resized and Cropped/CC BY-SA 2.0]

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