Steve Bannon is going to the mat for Natalie Harp, and taking a swipe at President Donald Trump’s chief of staff in the process.

Bannon, a former White House chief strategist and host of the “War Room” podcast, told NBC News that Harp, one of Trump’s closest aides, is “hated by certain high-level elements on the White House staff,” and he said the same of Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte.

“Otherwise these relentless, vicious, anonymous personal attacks [on them] would not continue unabated in the ‘legacy media,’” Bannon said. “It is long past time for Susie Wiles to step in and order it stopped — and stopped now.”

The comments appeared in a deep-diver NBC report on Pulte, who Trump advisers griped pitches the president “the weirdest ideas,” often on foam poster boards. A Republican congressional aide called Pulte “low-hanging fruit” for Democrats if they win Congress and predicted the GOP won’t stand in their way.

Bannon’s call for Wiles to intervene comes at a touchy moment for both the chief of staff and Harp.

Earlier this month, Politico Playbook reported that Harp printed out a previous Playbook newsletter about Wiles’ future and handed it to Trump, setting off what three people described as a “freakout.” The newsletter reported that Trump had been asking allies about replacing Wiles, and Playbook said he made more calls about her after reading it.

Trump dismissed the report as “TOTAL FAKE NEWS” and called Wiles “my loyal and longest serving Chief of Staff.”

Harp, a special assistant and executive assistant to the president, is nicknamed the “human printer” by colleagues because she prints flattering articles and online comments for Trump. She has become a near-constant presence at his side, and Trump hailed her as a “perfect person” at an Oct. 5 rally in Nebraska.

Not everyone in Trump’s orbit is charmed. Advisers have described Harp as “poisonous,” according to The New York Times, and CNN has reported on her chaotic, erratic style. Still, journalist Chris Whipple said in September that Harp has a “hold” over Trump rivaling Wiles’ own, because she “speaks his language” and is “on his side unequivocally.”

Bannon, for his part, appears ready to make that fight public.

As part of a discussion about the controversial ad launched by Ohio Republican Vivek Ramaswamy against his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, The Bulwark editor Sam Stein interjected a cautionary note on "Morning Joe."

As pointed out by former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), the ad, where Acton’s mother called her sexual assault survivor daughter a “liar,” should end Ramaswamy’s fledgling political career.

According to Stein, years of Donald Trump attacks have altered the calculus.

“I'm going to zag ever so slightly,” he began. “I don't think this is a good ad — I just want to be clear about that. But I'm not totally convinced yet that it won't work because they're going to put four plus million dollars behind it.”

“I don't know what the ecosystem, the news ecosystem, is for Ohio voters,” he admitted. “It's possible that it backfired spectacularly. It's possible that enough people see the ad and they say, ‘Something's weird there.’ I will note this: the backlash that you see is real, but I don't know how far it extends and I'm worried about that.”

“So we looked at [Republican Governor] Mike DeWine denouncing the ad,” he elaborated. “Mike DeWine was also asked if he would pull his endorsement from Ramaswamy, and he said no; he still endorses Vivek Ramaswamy for governor. So there are limitations. And this makes me a little bit scared, right? Because let's say, and again, I don't know if this is going to be true, but let's say it does work. Let's say Vivek Ramaswamy does win. That then sets the template for this type of despicable, gross, immoral type of campaigning. Going forward, everyone's going to take a chapter of that playbook.”

“So this has upped the stakes of the Ohio election in a way that I think is really profound,” he added.

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President Donald Trump has openly cheered what independent journalist Ken Klippenstein described as the “worst corporate heist in years,” one that has elevated the costs of everything from groceries to airfare.

That “heist,” as Klippenstein referred to it, was the oil industry’s record-high profits that have continued even as Middle East oil exports have since climbed back to pre-Iran war levels, as reported this week by the Financial Times.

“We were told the high prices was just a fact of life since the Strait of Hormuz was closed. It was bull---- then, as I tried to warn months ago,” Klippenstein wrote in an analysis published Thursday on his Substack. “Now it’s even harder to deny.”

As flagged by Klippenstein, the oil industry’s margin on diesel — known as the diesel crack spread — has “exploded” in recent months, climbing from $33 a barrel in February to a record-high $106 in September. Oil executives have openly boasted about their enormous profits during earnings calls, though they continue to point to the cost of crude oil as justification for elevated fuel costs.

“The industry will say crude is still expensive, and that’s true. Brent hit nearly $112 a barrel Thursday as Iran keeps attacking tankers, and shipping a supertanker from the Gulf to China now costs more than ten times what it did before the war,” Klippenstein wrote.

“But that explains the price of crude. It doesn’t explain why the industry’s cut of every barrel ballooned to record levels, or why companies chose to export fuel while domestic supplies hit record lows.”

In June, Trump accused oil companies of price gouging, going as far as to instruct the Justice Department to investigate companies for not bringing gasoline prices down quickly enough.

“Yet in the same breath he also can’t help bragging about the profits bonanza,” Klippenstein noted.

As recently as Oct. 14, Trump boasted about the high cost of oil, claiming at a rally in Arizona that “our country is making more money than it’s ever made because of the fact that oil is so high.”

“The president, in other words, sees the profit bonanza. He just doesn’t see that it isn’t ‘our country’ benefiting from it,” Klippenstein wrote.

“So why isn’t there an uproar? Because naked profiteering has been dressed up as a ‘national security’ issue… Meanwhile the oil companies hide behind the flag while picking your pocket. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the oil found a way around it. Now the oil companies are the ones charging tolls.”