This Top Trump Aide 'Hated Every Second' in the White House but Thought They Were 'Doing the Lord's Work'

According to USA Today, a new documentary about him shows former top Trump strategist Bannon being candid about his turbulent role in the administration

Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Steve Bannon‘s time in President Donald Trump‘s orbit was brief but consequential — churning through numerous national headlines between his appointment to run Trump’s campaign in August 2017 and his dismissal almost exactly a year later from the White House, where he had been chief strategist.

According to USA Today, a new documentary about him shows Bannon being candid about his turbulent role in the Trump administration.

“There’s no glamour to the job. I hated every second I was there,” he says in The Brink, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, USA Today reports. “The West Wing has bad karma to it. They say, ‘Because you were doing bad stuff!’ But I was doing the Lord’s work.”

According to the paper, Bannon is less harsh about his former boss.

“Donald Trump is a historical figure and a transformative president,” he reportedly says in The Brink. “Donald Trump will be in your personal life 30 years from now, whether you like it or not.”

Trump’s White House has seen an unusually high turnover, with several former staffers going on to share stories from their time on his team. Some accounts have been positive. Many have been vicious, describing a poisonous environment without regular rules or order.

Omarosa Manigault Newman, who rose to notoriety on the first season of The Apprentice alongside Trump, left the administration in December 2017 and in a book about her time there said Trump was a “racist.”

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US President Donald Trump (L) congratulates Senior Counselor to the President Stephen Bannon during the swearing-in of senior staff in the East Room of the White House on January 22, 2017 in Washington, DC. / AFP / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Bannon’s White House exit was further sullied five months later when he left his top post at the right-wing website Breitbart News, where he worked before joining the Trump campaign and had retreated after leaving.

But at the height of his influence, Bannon was the subject of intense curiosity and criticism. A self-described populist and economic nationalist, he was a key aide in both shaping and helping execute Trump’s conservative policies, including the travel ban on several majority Muslim countries.

TIME described Bannon in a February 2017 cover story as the “Great Manipulator” and Saturday Night Live parodied him as a doom-voiced skeleton. He and Trump were bonded in part by a mutual disdain for so-called “globalists” who they felt were willing to undercut American interests at the expense of others. But over time the president, ever sensitive to his image, chafed at the perception he was being influenced by a staffer.

Since leaving the administration and Breitbart, amid reports he harshly criticized the Trump children, Bannon has continued to agitate in political circles both in America and abroad — but with a drastically smaller profile or success.

Recently Bannon has partnered with a billionaire Chinese dissident to work against the communist government there, according to the New York Times.

For all of Bannon’s kind words about Trump, the president has not always said the same in return, referring to him last year as “Sloppy Steve.”