The President says Mr. Bannon has "lost his mind".
The White House spokeswoman accused him of aiding the publication of "trash fiction".
Our Washington Correspondent Simon Marks reports.
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Sometimes in President Trump's Washington you just can't make it up….and so it was during a dizzying 36 hours here.
First, there was the stream of Presidential invective on Twitter, including the "my nuclear button is bigger than your nuclear button" taunting of Kim Jong Un in North Korea.
But that was eclipsed when the White House took a blowtorch to the President's former right-hand man, Steven Bannon….suddenly, announced spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on the outs with the Trump team.
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The claims she's talking about are contained in a new by book by author Michael Wolff.
Steven Bannon tells him that Donald Trump Junior, the President's son, engaged in "treasonous" and "unpatriotic" behavior when he met Russian emissaries at Trump Tower in the middle of the 2016 election.
Mr. Bannon says the President's son should have called the FBI, and he says he's "certain" that Donald Trump Junior would have introduced the Russians to his father, then the Republicans Presidential candidate.
So that gave rise to this remarkable exchange in the White House briefing room.
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But there was plenty of inconsistency to go around after President Trump; angry statement saying that when Mr. Bannon was fired, "he not only lost his job, he lost his mind"….a statement that diminished the role Mr. Bannon played in both the campaign and the Presidency.
The man who once controversially served on the President's National Security Council is now described by the White House as "making himself seem far more important than he was".
And then there were the inevitable questions about that nuclear button Tweet.
Did the taunting of Kim Jong Un on social media indicate that President Trump is the one who's lost his mind?
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For the record, she didn't directly address President Trump's mental capacity.
The events of 2018 so far have made it once again a live issue of debate in Washington.
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