Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s white supremacist chief adviser, is taking up a lot of attention and energy in a presidential transition that’s already in disarray. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy got into a long exchange with reporters over Bannon on Monday, responding to questions citing various racist, anti-Semitic, and sexist Breitbart News headlines with gems like this:
The president-elect has to be able to select his best team. There will be a lot of different appointments to go through. What do they say, how many slots does a president have to fill? Is it more than 4,000? There’s a lot of people to go through.
And if number 3,998 was a white supremacist, the media probably wouldn’t be asking you a bunch of questions about it. But this is a tie for number one. Of course, McCarthy also tried to deny that Bannon’s appointment was at the level of Reince Priebus as chief of staff, but CNN’s Deirdre Walsh—to her credit—corrected him.
Other Republicans have also decided to publicly support Bannon. Some have decided that the best defense is a good offense. Well, maybe not good, but an offense:
But Republicans seem unwilling to judge Bannon on that track record — or even accept that he bears responsibility for the more incendiary headlines from the news organization he led.
“Did he write it? Give me something that he wrote,” Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), said when asked about whether Bannon’s appointment. “I hear a lot of innuendo of this, but I haven’t seen it.”
Hmm. So Bannon isn’t responsible for things that appeared on his website? It’ll be interesting to watch that kind of no-accountability view be put into place for the presidency.
In that vein, consider the bar officially lowered:
“Of course I’d have serious problems with anti-Semitic statements coming out of the White House, but I don’t expect that,” said Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.)
Sure. As long as explicitly anti-Semitic statements so unveiled that they can’t be explained away aren’t coming directly out of the White House, it’s all good.
This is the position Donald Trump has Republicans in already, while he’s still flailing and struggling to realize that the presidency is work and not just a cool title. It can and will get worse.