If CNN, the same network that called Trump’s egregious Second Amendment remarks “ambiguous” instead of acknowledging their inherent stochastic terrorism, refers to your new campaign CEO as a “master of the dark arts” – a common foe of Harry Potter – you might want to reconsider your life choices.
We all know Trump is a busy man – if not he, who will insult things on Twitter or complain about the upcoming presidential debates? Yet somehow, he recently managed to find the time to snap up yet another guy named Steve – he has six already – to help him run his campaign. This Steve’s last name is Bannon, and he so happens to have spent a considerable amount of time running a website called Breitbart News.
Breitbart is what happens when white supremacy goes unchecked, stews in its own entitlement, and is handed a Red Bull and a microphone. Their articles are misogynistic, xenophobic, racist, conceited, dedicated to islamophobic dog-whistling, homophobic, anti-Semitic, violently sexist and ableist, and encouraging of clearly untrue conspiracy theories – so, bigoted tripe.
This is a website CNN has called “scorched earth” and “fringy.” In hiring the ringleader of this neo-Nazi circus – especially after the fiasco surrounding the anti-Semitic meme of Hillary Clinton he tweeted – Donald Trump has implicitly given that circus a stamp of approval. Like an ironically science-phobic Ross Geller, Trump is unable – and unwilling – to pivot.
That isn’t okay, even though at this point it’s the kind of move we’ve come to expect from a man running for President, seemingly, because he doesn’t like many people who share this nation with him—women, people of color, and queer and trans folks included. (Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been running the most diverse and representative campaign this entire time, starting out the gate during the primaries with a team chock-full of women, people of color, and queer folks.)
Not content just to hire a snow-white team of seven Steves, another new addition to Trump’s roster of horrors is Kellyanne Conway. Not content to limit her second-coming-of-Phyllis-Schlafly act to feminist—sorry, “feminine” progress, Conway also doesn’t much like LGBTQ folks, people of color, and anyone who doesn’t swim in money. Luckily for The Donald, Conway won’t be trying to cramp his style any time soon. (Her latest advice to him? “Be authentic.”)
Trump topped it all off, though, when he recently hired Roger Ailes, the former Fox News Chief accused of sexual harassment by at least 20 different women, to advise him.
Ailes, Bannon, and their ilk have apparently never met an accomplished woman they didn’t hate; it will be poetic justice for one of those very women to soundly defeat the candidate they cling to so desperately.
And hey, if those of us who didn’t leave our heads back in 1950 don’t like Trump, maybe in honor of its 96th year after ratification last week, we 19th Amendment people can do something about it.