Trump eviscerates Steve Bannon in a blistering statement: 'He not only lost his job, he lost his mind'

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Donald Trump.

• President Donald Trump torched former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon on Wednesday.
• "Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency," Trump said. "When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind."
• The statement came after excerpts from a book were released in which Bannon criticizes many in Trump's orbit.

President Donald Trump has had it with his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

In a scathing Wednesday statement, Trump, who has defended Bannon and not spoken poorly of him since his August exit from the White House, eviscerated the Breitbart News executive and said "he lost his mind."

"Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency," Trump said. "When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party. Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I make it look."

The statement came after excerpts from columnist Michael Wolff's upcoming book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," were published Wednesday. In them, Bannon is quoted as saying White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., held what amounted to a "treasonous" meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in July 2016, adding that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators would "crack Don Jr. like an egg on national TV." Elsewhere, Bannon was quoted in several recent pieces disparaging Trump.

"Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country," Trump continued. "Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans."

That comment was a reference to Bannon backing embattled Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, alleged to have committed sexual misconduct with teenagers when he was in his 30s. Trump initially backed the incumbent senator, Luther Strange, but eventually backed Moore.

"Steve doesn't represent my base - he's only in it for himself," Trump said. "Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books."

"We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda," he continued. "Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down."