Washington – Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid says President-elect Donald Trump should rescind Stephen Bannon’s appointment as a top White House aide.
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Reid says that “as long as a champion of racial division is a step away from the Oval Office, it would be impossible to take Trump’s efforts to heal the nation seriously.”
Reid made the comment in a Senate floor speech. He joins a growing chorus of Democrats calling on Trump to get rid of Bannon, whose Breitbart website aligns with white nationalist ideologies.
Reid said Trump’s election had “sparked a wave of hate crimes.” Nonetheless he said Democrats “want to work with Mr. Trump when we can.”
Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn then stood and remarked that “we used to call people like that sore losers.”
Before he took over as chief executive of Trump’s campaign in August and led it to victory last week, Bannon headed Breitbart News, a website and voice for the alt-right movement, a loose right-wing confederation that includes hardcore nationalists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites.
Five days after Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump rewarded Bannon, 62, a former Goldman Sachs banker and a Navy veteran, by appointing him senior counselor and chief strategist – jobs not subject to U.S. Senate confirmation.
Democrats, rights activists and minority groups were outraged and said Trump, himself accused of racism and misogyny during the campaign, had just flung open the White House doors to hatemongers. Many urged him to reconsider.
“Bringing Steve Bannon into the White House is an alarming signal that President-elect Trump remains committed to the hateful and divisive vision that defined his campaign,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement on Monday.
“There must be no sugar-coating the reality that a white nationalist has been named chief strategist for the Trump administration,” Pelosi said.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League and the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) also denounced Bannon.
Bannon, who grew up in a Democratic family, has a reputation of trying to tear down a Republican Party establishment that he deemed too soft and too entrenched.
As a senior adviser to the Republican Trump, Bannon will be expected by far-right groups to champion their views and make sure that Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, keeps such campaign promises as building a wall on the southern U.S. border, cracking down on Muslims entering the country and restricting the influx of Syrian war refugees.
“Perhaps ‘The Donald’ is for real,” Rocky Suhayda, chairman of the American Nazi Party, told CNN.
David Duke, a longtime leader of Ku Klux Klan movements, and Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who runs the National Policy Institute, were among the leading alt-right figures to praise Bannon’s appointment.
In remarks published in the New York Times on Tuesday, Bannon ascribed his interest in populism and American nationalism to a desire to curb what he views as the corrosive effects of globalization. He rejected what he called the “ethno-nationalist” tendencies of some in the movement.
“It’s not that some people on the margins, as in any movement, aren’t bad guys – racists, anti-Semites. But that’s irrelevant,” he told the Times.
Political commentator Armstrong Willliams, a close associate of former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, said Bannon was “one of the finest and most honorable people I’ve ever met” and not bigoted in any way.
The Trump campaign had been struggling to manage Trump’s unconventional candidacy when Bannon took over. He stayed behind the scenes and devised the strategy for the final days of the campaign that kept Trump on message and enabled him to upset Clinton in crucial states such as Michigan.
It was Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who invited three women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to attend a presidential debate in hopes of unnerving Hillary Clinton. Bannon, looking typically unkempt with mussed hair and stubbly chin, grinned from the back of the room as Trump and the women held their pre-debate news conference.
“Bannon is a legitimately sinister figure,” Ben Shapiro, who had been editor-in-chief of Breitbart under Bannon, wrote in August on the dailywire.com conservative news website which he founded.
“He is a vindictive, nasty figure … He will attempt to ruin anyone who impedes his unending ambition and he will use anyone bigger than he is – for example, Donald Trump – to get where he wants to go,” Shapiro wrote.
It would be only with great difficulty that I would ever accept anything from Harry Reid. He is seriously conceited, and he is more beholden to the political party than to the government or his constituents. I am thrilled that he is leaving office, and I wish he would grace us with his silence. All the divisiveness we are witnessing after the election is consistent with the partisan divisiveness he drove throughout his political career. Frankly, that is a great disgrace to him, and it has contributed to setting us back many decades in unity and progress. He is a sore loser, though it does not matter all that much to him as he retires. He will take his government pension and benefits, and all the wreckage of Obamacare and his fears about Trump will never actually affect him. But his poor bruised ego, oh, what a poor thing.
I have too little knowledge about Bannon to opine. But Reid’s pressure here is unwarranted,especially on the Senate floor. Old fool.
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Are these same democrats that said Trump cant win that the American people disgareed with them? Lol
Yeah, Harry. We’ll listen to you after you fought so hard against Obama’s Iran deal.
Thank you for your sensitivity toward the Jewish people.
Joel Pollak is a jew in who is a senior executive journalist for Brietbart attests that Bannon loves jews.
Alan Dershowitz no right winger stated on MSNBC that there is no proof at all that Bannon is anti-Semite. And as far as his supporters, that does not reflect the man himself.
Shapiro, is a disgruntled employee with his own agenda.
Old man it’s time to retire and take Obama with you. I am sure Obama could teach you how to play golf.