Bannon out but Trump still racist

[struggle4progress]

Eric Armstrong

... White House Chief of Staff John Kelly fired Bannon on Friday, presumably to give the beleaguered consigliere more free time to ominously mill in the background of somebody else’s ethno-nationlist meetings ... Bannon’s departure is certainly a good thing. The fewer white nationalists in the halls of power the better. But make no mistake, those same views will enjoy the world’s loudest bullhorn as long as Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/144423/steve-bannon-out-donald-trump-still-racist

[struggle4progress]

1. Bannon or no Bannon, Trump will be Trump

By Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 3:38 AM ET, Sat August 19, 2017

... the most disruptive, unpredictable, outrageous influence in the White House is going nowhere, and he just happens to be the man in charge.

"Trump is still President and he is an uncontrollable force, we have found out," said David Gergen, an adviser to four presidents, Democrats and Republicans.

"A lot of the chaos and spewing of hatred comes from him himself, not just the people around him" ...

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/18/politics/donald-trump-bannon-ouster-fallout/index.html

[struggle4progress]

2. Bannons Departure Wont Save Presidency

By John Cassidy
August 18, 2017

... e’s boneheaded. He’s a divider rather than a unifier. If he’s not an outright racist — and many people would say that he is — he’s .. eager to exploit the racial prejudices that .. his supporters harbor. And he hates being pressed to distance himself from .. racist goons ...

As someone who had long proclaimed that the America of his childhood was under grave threat from multiculturalism and what he referred to as “Islamic fascism,” Bannon was perfectly comfortable with Trump’s strident embrace of nativism and revanchism; indeed, he had promoted this same approach during his tenure as the chief executive of Breitbart News. In the early days of the Administration, he worked hard to get some of Trump’s more incendiary proposals enacted, including his crackdown on undocumented immigrants and his ban on Muslims entering the United States.

But to hold Bannon responsible for Trump’s most offensive gestures and utterances — including the President’s refusal, this week, to distance himself from white nationalists and neo-Nazis — would be going too far. At his Trump Tower press conference, Trump said that he hadn’t even talked to Bannon about what happened in Charlottesville. His equating of the “Unite the Right” marchers with the counter-protesters; his claim that there were some “really fine people” on both sides; the comparison he drew between the Founding Fathers and the leaders of the Confederacy — these were all Trump’s own handiwork.

... Bannon was useful to him because he had the instincts of a political brawler and the ability to convert rabble-rousing rhetoric into something that could be presented to the gullible as a semi-coherent political philosophy. But now that Bannon has departed, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the President will change his ways. Trump is Trump is Trump. That is how it has always been. That is how it always will be ...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/getting-rid-of-bannon-wont-save-trump