Trump’s grossest aide reportedly just got fired
In news that could maybe be considered “good” compared to all the other shit that’s going on, Donald Trump is allegedly giving Steve Bannon the boot.
Breitbart claims Bannon resigned on Aug. 7, way before Charlottesville, but he literally used to own Breitbart so let’s take that info with a grain of salt. It’s more likely that his firing is a new development, designed to minimize the damage caused by Trump’s ongoing botching of the Charlottesville situation. From CNN:
“Sources told CNN that Bannon’s ouster had been in the works for two weeks and a source said that while Bannon was given the option to resign, he was ultimately forced out. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed Bannon’s departure, but claimed the decision for him to leave was mutual.”
Steve Bannon has been Donald Trump’s chief strategist throughout his presidency. Before that, he ran Breitbart, a notorious right-wing website that has provided us with necessary and informative news coverage like “There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews.”
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Bannon and Breitbart maintain the worldview that white Americans are under attack and need to fight back to preserve the country as it has been since 1776 (a.k.a. a racist, capitalist, homophobic patriarchy).
Yup, Steve Bannon’s white victim complex is about as intense as Taylor Swift’s. Check out his speech at the Vatican from 2014 and you’ll see how invested he is in the idea that we’re “at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.” There are a lot of parallels between his worldview and that of the gun-toting white supremacists Vice caught on film at Charlottesville.
Bannon has reportedly never gotten along with many of Trump’s other advisors, especially Jared Kushner. And he was reportedly one of the only advisors to “embrace” Trump’s idiotic statement that the violence at Charlottesville was due to “all sides” being at fault, and not the fact that literal fucking Nazis and KKK members were walking the streets.
I mean, I don’t have to tell you how bad the fallout from those comments was. Even Republicans were horrified. Bannon did call the Charlottesville marchers a “fringe element,” “losers” and a “collection of clowns” in an interview with The American Prospect. But the general public mostly believes Steve Bannon is the guy behind Trump’s white-nationalist-skewed worldview. So it makes sense that he’s getting the boot as Trump’s advisors scramble to make the president appear less like a neo-Nazi sympathizer.
Now that Bannon’s out, it’s possible Trump’s advisors are going to make some progress convincing him to speak out definitively against Nazis and the KKK. That would be pretty chill, right?
