by Itunuoluwa Adebo

President Donald Trump on Monday  has dismissed  reports that his administration is rife with discord, saying he is sticking by his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, calling him a “very decent guy” who is getting a “bad rap.”

Trump  revealed his own term for Bannon’s ideology: “alt-left,” a play on Bannon’s ties to the nationalist conservative movement called the alt-right. Why alt-left? “Bannon’s more of a libertarian than anything else, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg  in the Oval Office.

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He said Chief of Staff Reince Priebus  and Steve Bannon are both  likely still be in their same roles several months from now, along  counselor Kellyanne Conway and press secretary Sean Spicer. Trump also said that Bannon and senior adviser, son-in-law Jared Kushner, have managed to repair their relationship.

“Bannon is a very decent guy who feels very strongly about the country. Likewise, Jared. And they’re getting along fine,” Trump said, calling Kushner “a very brilliant young guy.” “We have a lot of people that are getting along well,” Trump said. “It’s coming out better now than it was, you know, for a while. And for a while it was a little testy, I guess for some of them, but I said, ‘You’ve got to get your acts together.”

Since late March, Trump has been said to be considering a shuffle of his top advisers. The whisper campaign in Washington — sometimes targeting Priebus and other times Bannon — resulted from squabbling within the inner circle and a string of setbacks for Trump’s nascent presidency.

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Reports of bad blood between Priebus and Bannon were crowding the headlines in February,  the pair presented a united front in a series of news interviews and at a speaking appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Major speculation concerning  Priebus’s future reached its peak when House Republicans failed to advance legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare.