President Trump makes white supremacist his chief strategist at the White House

President Trump has started as he clearly means to go on, by appointing three of his adult children to the White House transition team, and now, by making Stephen Bannon, the white supremacist who heads shock-horror news portal Breitbart News, and who led his election campaign towards the end, his chief strategist and senior counsellor in the Oval Office.

Bannon, whose political views are unabashedly as Far Right as those of a 1990s British skinhead, has built a career on being ‘anti-Establishment’. But now, as the commentators point out, he has landed himself a top insider’s job at the pinnacle of the very Establishment he has spent the last two decades railing against.

Andrew Breitbart, who founded the eponymous web portal, admired Bannon enormously, at one point even describing him as “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement”. Riefenstahl produced propaganda films for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi government, for which she was vilified after World War II had ended.

Breitbart News hired Stephen Bannon after Andrew Breitbart died suddenly four years ago. The site specialises in ‘click-bait’ stories that troll traffic by getting people to click on outrageous headlines. Typical ones include: ‘Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?’ and ‘Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy’.

Stephen Bannon