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As Jared Kushner takes on ever more jobs, Steve Bannon has just lost one:

President Donald Trump has removed Steve Bannon, his chief strategist, from the National Security Council, according to a filing in the federal registry. A top White House official told NBC News that Bannon was put on the NSC’s Principals’ Committee only as a check against then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Now that Flynn is gone, Bannon is no longer needed in that role, the official said.

O…kay. So Trump appointed a guy as National Security Advisor who was so volatile and incompetent that he needed a minder? That’s not a very reassuring clarification.

It’s also not true, but nobody cares. It’s impossible to prove that it’s not true, so there’s nothing we can do except shrug and accept it. Anything that gets Bannon off the NSC is fine with the rest of the world, I imagine, so we’ll all just give it a pass.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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