As everyone from Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch to White House flash-in-the-pan Anthony Scaramucci to Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls on Donald Trump to fire chief strategist and white supremacist/alt-right booster Steve Bannon, the GOP's House crazies are offering a different take, writes the New York Times.
Mr. Bannon also has admirers, including Representative Mark Meadows, the North Carolina Republican and the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, who said that without Mr. Bannon, “there is a concern among conservatives that Washington, D.C., will influence the president in a way that moves him away from those voters that put him in the White House.”
And Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa and an immigration hard-liner, said that shoving out Mr. Bannon would leave conservatives “crushed.”
Let's be clear: when the likes of Meadows and King fret over alienating "those voters" that elected Trump, they're fretting over alienating the racist/white supremacist wing of the Republican Party—because that's who Bannon represents inside the White House. He once bragged about providing the so-called alt-right a platform at Breitbart, and now he's their champion inside the West Wing. By all counts, Bannon consulted with Trump "repeatedly" last weekend regarding the Chartlottesville violence and "cautioned" him not to estrange his racist base of white supremacist and neo-Nazi supporters. Trump complied because he's just that desperate for a fan base.
Then there's people who willingly call out Bannon out as the cancer he is.
“I don’t think that White House has a chance of functioning properly as long as there’s a resident lunatic fringe,” said Mark Salter, a longtime adviser to Sen. John McCain, Republican of Arizona. At best, he said, Mr. Bannon seems willing to “tolerate something that’s intolerable” in Mr. Trump’s base.
As does Trump, who on Tuesday defended the white supremacists and neo-Nazi violence that led to the death of an innocent woman and the injury of 19 others over the weekend.