“I let the President down”

Donald Trump’s press secretary has said he “let the president down”, in an passionate apology for comments in which he suggested Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons and referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust Centres”.

Sean Spicer’s efforts to redeem himself come amid reports of fierce infighting in the White House, with Donald Trump distancing himself from Steve Bannon, his chief strategist. “I made a mistake. There’s no other way to say it. I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have and I screwed up,”  Spicer said during an event at a museum in Washington. “On both a personal level and a professional level that will definitely go down as not a very good day in my history.”

Spicer caused outrage when he suggested at a White House briefing that Bashar al-Assad had sunk lower than Hitler by using sarin gas in last week’s attack in Syria. He claimed that Hitler “didn’t descend to using chemical weapons”.

It was the latest blooper from a White House  with reports infighting and bitter rivalries between Trump’s top aides. But in recent days he has clashed with Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law, who controls a large policy portfolio and whose politics are reportedly more centrist.

Clearly exasperated by the fight,Donald  Trump told a daily from New York, “Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will.” And he sought to undermine reports of Bannon’s influence, asserting that he is his “own strategist”.