They were asides in an Obama press conference on Monday – “gestures are important;” and later, “it’s important to send signals of unity – to reach out to minority groups and others who were concerned by the tenor of the campaign.”
The outgoing president deliberately sidestepped invitations to join a critics’ pile-on over Donald Trump’s naming of the white nationalist lightning rod Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist in the White House.
Trump is enamoured of Bannon for his role in converting what had been a chaotic presidential campaign into a stunningly winning venture. But Bannon came to Trump from Breitbart News, an online haven for conspiracy theorists and for the so-called alt-right, an outlier conservative movement steeped in racist rhetoric, white nationalism and anti Semitism.
The Anti-Defamation League weighed in, calling it “a sad day.” And the Council on American-Islamic Relations criticised Breitbart for peddling “misogynistic and racist stories targeting women, people of colour and immigrants.”
Read the report by Paul McGeough in the Sydney Morning Herald.
[Refer also to ‘Obama dodges question about Trump’s appointment of alt-right extremist to top White House spot‘ and ‘Glenn Beck: Steve Bannon ‘is a nightmare’ who ‘wants to burn it down‘ from Business Insider Australia.]