Racism And Chaos Ahead

Click here for an article by Paul Waldman at the Washington Post entited " The Trump administration hasn't started yet, and already it's a fiasco."

Waldman quotes another WaPo article by Jose A. DelReal entitled "Trump draws sharp rebuke, concerns over newly appointed chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon":

President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist in the White House has drawn a sharp rebuke from political strategists who see in Bannon a controversial figure too closely associated with the “alt-right” movement, which white nationalists have embraced.

Waldman replies:

There has been way too much euphemizing about Bannon, so let’s talk plainly. He’s not just a “controversial” figure who ran a “provocative” web site. He is one of the foremost drivers of the spread of white nationalism in the United States today, and Breitbart is a firehose of thinly veiled racism and anti-Semitism, spewing its endless supply of poison into our politics.

“We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon told journalist Sarah Posner this year. In the words of Ben Shapiro, a former editor for Breitbart, the alt-right is “a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism.” Bannon disagrees — sort of. “Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely,” he told Posner. “But I don’t believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic.”

Now let’s not forget that Trump was retweeting white supremacist memes and attacking a variety of minority groups long before Bannon joined his campaign as chief executive. Bannon didn’t make “Trump for President” into a white nationalist campaign, because it already was. So whatever Bannon suggests is going to find a ready audience in his boss.

Characterizing Trump as "clueless," Waldman says:

This is appalling, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Those of us who actually contemplated a Trump presidency during the campaign were particularly disturbed not just by Trump’s ignorance, but also by the fact that it was accompanied by a certainty that he knew everything he needed to know, despite the fact that he knew virtually nothing. He would regularly claim that he was smarter and more knowledgeable than everyone who actually had experience in government and policy, despite never having served a day in government or spent a moment thinking about policy.

Asked whom he consulted on foreign affairs, he said, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.” On fighting terrorism, he said, “I know more about ISIS [the Islamic State] than the generals do, believe me.” I suppose that any day now he’s going to unveil that secret plan to defeat the Islamic State, which he said was “a foolproof way of winning,” but he couldn’t tell us what it was because then the Islamic State would know and it would be ruined. Even Republicans knew that he was just lying.

A couple of days after the election, Trump was tweeting out insults of The New York Times. Presidential behavior? Not quite.