Donald Trump is facing a “coup”, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said, adding that as a result the US was facing a crisis comparable only to that faced by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war.

In an interview in Italy, the former Trump campaign manager and White House strategist discussed an anonymous column in the New York Times detailing resistance within the Trump administration.

“What you saw the other day was as serious as it can get. This is a direct attack on the institutions,” Bannon said. “This is a coup, OK.”

The column was published on Wednesday and was written by an unnamed senior administration official, the New York Times said. The writer slammed Trump’s “amorality” and said: “Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.“

Bannon said the last time a US president was challenged in such a fashion was when Gen George B McClellan clashed with Lincoln.

“This is a crisis,” he said. “The country has only ever had such a crisis in the summer of 1862 when Gen McClellan and the senior generals, all Democrats in the union army, deemed that Abraham Lincoln was not fit and not competent to be commander in chief.”

The first Republican president survived in office, demoted McClellan, ended slavery, won the war and became an American icon beloved of liberals and conservatives alike and often rated by historians in the top two or three occupants of the White House. Trump, the 45th president, regularly invokes “Honest Abe” as a rare predecessor able to match up to his achievements

Trump said on Friday the justice department should find out who wrote the Times piece, adding that it was an issue of national security.

Bannon was fired by Trump in August 2017 after he fell out with the president’s more mainstream advisers over his efforts to bend the Republican party to his economic nationalist agenda.

He said he resigned from his post and told CBS television at the time that the “Republican establishment” was looking to nullify the 2016 election and neuter Trump.

“There is a cabal of Republic establishment figures who believe Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. This is a crisis,” Bannon said in Rome. “I am not a conspiracy guy ... I have said there is no deep state. It is an in-your-face state.”

He warned progressives within the Democratic party, such as supporters of the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, not to take any pleasure in the White House turmoil.

“Don’t think it will be any different if you take power. Because this is the established order dictating that they know better than the people,” he said.

 The Guardian