President-elect
Donald Trump has appointed Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist.
Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News Network, ‘a
platform for the alt-right’. Here we explain what that means –
and why many liberals fear his appointment will encourage
antisemites, racists and misogynists
House speaker Paul
Ryan said on Tuesday that the Republican party was working
‘hand-in-glove’ with President-elect Donald Trump as he prepares
his cabinet. ‘Our job is not to look backward, our job is to look
forward, make President-elect Trump as successful as possible,’ he
said. Ryan was unanimously supported by his fellow Republicans on
Tuesday for renomination as speaker in the new Congress next year
Donald
Trump transition team in disarray after key adviser 'purged'
National
security adviser Mike Rogers leaves in ‘Stalinesque purge’ as
talks at Trump Tower continue amid uncertainty over role of
president-elect’s children
David Smith in
Washington
Tuesday 15 November
2016 19.29 GMT
Donald Trump’s
transition to the White House appeared to be in disarray on Tuesday
after the abrupt departure of a top national security adviser and
amid continuing questions over the role of his three children and
son-in-law.
Former Republican
congressman Mike Rogers stepped down from the president-elect’s
transition team without explanation, but one report attributed it to
a “Stalinesque purge”.
Late on Tuesday,
Trump attempted to paint a less chaotic picture, tweeting that the
transition process was “very organized”. He also wrote that only
he knew who “the finalists” were – seemingly an attempt to
liken the process to his reality TV show The Apprentice.
A week after his
election, Trump and Vice-President-elect Mike Pence were huddled at
Trump Tower in New York to work on key appointments as the US Senate
was due to resume business in a still shellshocked Washington.
Rogers chaired the
House intelligence committee and is a former army officer and FBI
special agent. He said he was proud of the work his team had done to
produce policy and personnel guidance “on the complex national
security challenges facing our great country”.
The departure
offered the latest clue that the transition is going to be every bit
as bumpy as feared. Last week the president-elect ditched the head of
the team, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who is mired in
political scandal, and replaced him with Pence.
NBC News quoted a
source as saying Rogers was the victim of a “Stalinesque purge”
of people close to Christie. “Two sources close to the situation
described an atmosphere of sniping and backbiting as Trump loyalists
position themselves for key jobs,” the network reported.
Some Republicans who
previously ostracised Trump are returning to the fold but not always
with success. Eliot Cohen, a senior state department official under
George W Bush, launched a stinging attack on the transition effort.
He tweeted:
“After exchange
[with] Trump transition team, changed my recommendation: stay away.
They’re angry, arrogant, screaming ‘you LOST!’ Will be ugly.”
A few days ago,
Cohen had encouraged the suspicious Republican foreign policy
establishment to rally around the president-elect.
Adding to the sense
of chaos, both the state department and Pentagon said they were yet
to hear from the incoming administration, while rumours swirled over
whether Trump’s children – Donald Jr, Eric, and Ivanka, and her
husband Jared Kushner – would seek top security clearances. Kushner
was said to have been instrumental in the departures of Christie and
Rogers.
Barack Obama told
reporters at the White House on Monday that he believed Trump was a
pragmatist, not an ideologue, and reiterated his commitment to a
smooth handover. But the Associated Press reported that coordination
between Trump’s transition team and White House staff is on hold
until Trump’s team signs a memorandum of understanding.
Speculation over
cabinet appointments intensified on Tuesday. Ben Carson, a retired
neurosurgeon and former Republican candidate for president tipped to
be health secretary, has dropped out of the running. “I want to
have the freedom to work on many issues and not be pigeonholed into
one particular area,” Carson, who is Trump’s most prominent
African American supporter, told the Washington Post.
The New York Times
reported that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, an old friend of
Trump, is the frontrunner for the prize job of secretary of state. He
has no foreign policy experience beyond strong advocacy for the war
on terror following the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, which gave
him global prominence.
But the political
action committee Correct the Record argued that Giuliani, 72, had a
“long history of business ties to enemies of America”. He was
reportedly paid to advocate on behalf of an Iranian dissident group
while it was listed by the state department as a foreign terrorist
organisation and worked for a law firm whose clients included Saddam
Hussein, terrorist Abu Nidal and an oil company controlled by the
then Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez. All these are potential red
flags if he goes before the Senate for confirmation.
Trump’s children
will take over the running of his business while he is in the White
House, raising the prospect of a conflict of interest. Responding to
claims that they are already exploiting his new status for commercial
ends, the former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted:
“Free advice: Stop it. Don’t do this. The presidency is bigger
than the family business. Just stop it.”
Trump, a tycoon,
reality TV star and political novice, has a long history of pitting
rivals against one another, both in business and during his election
campaign. He has appointed Steve Bannon as chief strategist and
Reince Priebus as chief of staff, an unprecedented arrangement that
threatens to create competing centers of power.
The inclusion of
Bannon, executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News, provoked
a furious backlash from progressives. The House Democratic leader,
Nancy Pelosi, said: “There must be no sugarcoating the reality that
a white nationalist has been named chief strategist for the Trump
administration.”
Departing US Senate
minority leader Harry Reid on Tuesday called on the president to
rescind Bannon’s appointment, which he said has only “deepened”
the country’s divisions since the election.
“By placing a
champion of white supremacists a step away from the Oval Office, what
message does Trump send to the young girl who woke up Wednesday
morning in Rhode Island afraid to be a woman of color in America?”
Reid said, speaking on the Senate floor.
Reid had previously
lashed out at the businessman in a powerful statement last week that
referred to the president-elect as “a sexual predator who lost the
popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate”.
In response to his
criticism, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager and
current transition team adviser, appeared to threaten legal action
against Reid and warned that the Democrat should be “very careful”
in his criticism of the president-elect.
But on Tuesday Paul
Ryan, the House speaker who is attempting to overcome past
disagreements with Trump, refused to condemn the appointment. “The
president is going to be judged on his results,” he told reporters.
“[Bannon] is a person who helped him win an incredible victory and
an incredible campaign.
Ryan promised that
Trump and a unified Republican Congress would mean that “a better
way, better days lie ahead for our country”. He pledged to work
“hand in glove” with the incoming administration.
The House speaker
was on course to be re-elected by Republicans on Tuesday afternoon
but House Democrats postponed leadership elections that had been
scheduled for Thursday until 30 November amid signs of discontent
with Pelosi.
Ongoing vote counts
show Democrat Hillary Clinton pulling away from Trump in the popular
vote, although he won the electoral college vote. Trump tweeted on
Tuesday: “If the election were based on total popular vote I would
have campaigned in N.Y., Florida and California and won even bigger
and more easily.”
Despite previously
labelling the electoral college a “disaster”, he tweeted that it
was “actually genius in that it brings all states, including the
smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!”
Trump’s
inauguration will take place in Washington on 20 January.
Additional reporting
by Lauren Gambino
Bannon’s
unveiling as Trump’s chief strategist is a layer cake of horrors
Lindy West
Tuesday 15 November
2016 15.43 GMT
The
Breitbart website peddles in disinformation, conspiracy theories and
dog-whistles of every far-right stripe. Putting its founder in the
White House is truly dangerous
The announcement
that Donald Trump has appointed Stephen Bannon, the former head of
far-right propaganda outlet Breitbart News, as his chief strategist
is a layer cake of horrors.
On a personal level,
Breitbart has long been an engine of anti-feminist harassment, and
Bannon directly profits from the fragile male hunger for punishing
disobedient women. I have been the subject of multiple Breitbart
smears (which come, inevitably and by design, with a deluge of
threats from sputtering Twitter eggs), as have most of the
high-profile feminists I know, along with Black Lives Matter leaders,
trans activists, rape victims, and even fellow conservatives who toe
a more establishment line.
Bannon’s site was
a home base for GamerGate, an interminable juggernaut of racist,
misogynist, and transphobic abuse aimed at stanching diversity in
video games, which eventually morphed into the youth wing of the
Trump campaign. It is beyond unsettling to imagine a man who has not
only attempted to ruin the lives of women I consider friends, but
monetised that abuse, hissing in the ear of the President of the
United States.
On a policy level,
the Bannon appointment is potentially catastrophic. Breitbart peddles
in disinformation, conspiracy theories and dog-whistles of every
far-right stripe – headlines under Bannon’s tenure have included
“Hoist it high and proud: The confederate flag proclaims a glorious
heritage”, “Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy”,
and “Clinton aide Huma Abedin ‘most likely a Saudi spy.’” The
Southern Poverty Law Center wrote of Bannon: “He has insinuated
that African-Americans are ‘naturally aggressive and violent’ and
under his leadership, Breitbart’s publishing strategy turned to one
that has made it the media arm of the racist Alternative-Right
movement, publishing articles promoting popular white nationalist
tropes such as ‘black on white crime’ and that ‘rape culture’
is inherent in Islam.”
Breitbart’s
writers and commentariat ecstatically cheered the destruction of
Gawker Media at the hands of rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel, in
case you were wondering where Bannon stands on freedom of the press.
They are rabidly obsessed with the rise of “political correctness”
on college campuses, claiming that activists are “policing speech”
by demanding safety and respect. Breitbart was a major driver of the
grossly distorted “Planned Parenthood sells baby parts” story,
and ruthlessly hounded rape survivor and activist Emma Sulkowicz,
showing a generation of young women what’s in store for them if
they report their sexual assaults.
Anyone who has been
paying attention to Breitbart’s metastasisation over the past
half-decade shouldn’t be surprised by the nationwide proliferation
of hate speech and vandalism since Trump’s victory: the website has
long seemed determined to stoke the culture wars until they explode
into some iteration of literal war. “Mike Pence wants 1957, and
that would be a nightmare,” a friend pointed out today, “but I
think Bannon wants 1939.”
White nationalist
and neo-Nazi groups openly gloried in Bannon’s appointment, just as
they – along with the Ku Klux Klan – celebrated Trump’s win all
week. “Bannon is our man in the White House,” wrote one commenter
at the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer – which, according to the
Southern Poverty Law Center, “claims to be the ‘#1 Alt-Right’
website”. Hey, you know who also claims to run the #1 Alt-Right
website? Bannon, who once referred to Breitbart as the “platform
for the alt-right”. In their own “guide to the alt-right”,
Breitbart acknowledges the neo-Nazis within their ranks. Meanwhile,
Ken Blackwell, a member of Trump’s transition team, told the Wall
Street Journal that Reince Priebus’s role as chief of staff will be
to “make the trains run on time”.
Trump with his new
chief of staff, Reince Priebus. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty
Images
You cannot make this
up. The Trump cabinet’s affinity for fascist rhetoric and
popularity among actual Nazis is not a coincidence, it is not subtle,
and Bannon et al are not remotely attempting to hide it, which brings
us to the third layer in this tower of terror: the servile
pusillanimity of the American press. Initial coverage of Bannon’s
appointment fell right in line with the cow-eyed credulity that’s
busy normalising Trump’s bigotry. At Reuters, Bannon was a
“conservative firebrand”, while the Associated Press dubbed him a
“flame-thrower”. “Trump pits establishment against populism at
the top of his White House team,” wrote the Washington Post.
Not a neo-Nazi
darling or a white nationalist hero or a xenophobic propagandist –
just a rascally maverick ready to shake up the GOP establishment!
After hours of outcry from progressive readers, the mainstream press
began to catch up, if tepidly – “Critics See Stephen Bannon,
Trump’s Pick for Strategist, as Voice of Racism,” the New York
Times intoned – but the precedent was clear. We will have to fight
tooth and nail for every molecule of honesty – to call racism
racism – for the next four years and probably beyond.
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