“Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power” "Darkness is good”, Steve Bannon Nov. 11, 2016
Fact: America was NEVER White
#Resist #TakeAction and #DefendDemocracy
My colleague Jeet Heer argued recently that top Trump advisor Steve Bannon, the white nationalist former chairman of the racist propaganda website Breitbart, is responsible for the consistency. “providing a coherent political philosophy for the president’s scattered ideas.” In other words, Trump isn’t a vessel for whichever Svengali-like figure happens to gain influence with him. He and Bannon share similar instincts, but Bannon is deliberate enough to make Trump’s id-driven pronouncements cohere.
There’s a precedent to the Trump-Bannon White House, according to Heer, in the relationship between Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, who “[gave] ideological coherence to his leader’s rants and blabber.” But we don’t have to turn the clock back to World War II to find a harbinger of their partnership. Trump ran a racist campaign for months without Bannon by his side. He won the GOP primary by portraying white America as under siege by immigrants and Muslims, shut out of urban life by what Breitbart would refer to as “Black Crime.”
The substantive platform, though, didn’t become clear until Bannon joined the campaign—after Trump had already accepted the GOP nomination—and the very policy agenda Trump is now implementing came into focus. Trump came up with the wall and the ban on his own, but Bannon threaded them together, and then into a broader plan of action that has white nationalists across the country swooning. We can safely assume that Bannon has been giving ideological coherence to Trump’s rants and blabber, because that’s what he’s done for Trump all along.