Steve Bannon is about to become one of the new president’s closest advisers.
Big deal? Uh, yeah! It’s a real big deal.
Donald J. Trump hasĀ done two things that are fundamentally at odds with each other. The president-elect vows to “unify” the country torn asunder by one of the most acrid — and putrid — presidential campaigns in its history.
Then he picks someone like Bannon to become his chief political adviser in the White House. Bannon is a virtually avowed white supremacist who ran the Breitbart News outfit before joining the Trump campaign this summer as its chief political strategist.
Bannon’s views about Muslims, gays, immigrants, African-Americans and other racial minorities are well-known. They are ugly, pernicious and totally unacceptable in someone who is advising the president of the United States of America.
Trump is about to become president of a nation that perhaps is more divided than at any time since, oh, the Civil War!
How in the name of all that is holy does the president-elect put someone of Bannon’s ilk in the West Wing of the White House, the people’s house?
Trump selected as well a White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who has been generally praised. Tradition holds that the chief of staff is the second most powerful person in the White House. Trump, though, said that Bannon and Priebus will work in tandem, with co-equal clout between them.
This is how you unify a nation?
The president-elect is sending precisely the wrong message.