This week in OnPolitics: Bye bye, Bannon

August 19, 2017
Washington

It’s Friday, OP-ers, and the theme of the week was white supremacy. Combine that with last week’s theme of nuclear war, and we aren’t sure what to do with ourselves.

Trump’s off to Camp David this weekend before returning to the White House full-time next week. So, there’s no break in the immediate future. But hey… Labor Day isn’t too far off? Maybe? Did we just jinx it?

Time to say goodbye

Another Friday, another White House departure. Steve Bannon is out from his role as chief strategist. The way the White House tells it, Chief of Staff John Kelly and Bannon agreed that today would be his last day. The way Bannon tells it, he resigned two weeks ago and they were going to announce it earlier this week, but then Charlottesville happened (more on that in a bit).

So, what’s next? One editor from Breitbart, the right-wing site that Bannon was once in charge of,Â has already declared “#WAR,” though it’s kind of unclear what this actually means. And back at the White House, Trump has an ever-shrinking pool of advisers to turn to. (At the very least, we assume he’ll never fire Ivanka and Jared. As Dom Toretto said in Furious 7, “I don’t have friends. I have family.”)

The Charlottesville debacle

It shouldn’t be hard to denounce a group of people that included neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan members. And yet.

Let’s recap: Last week, violent clashes broke out in Charlottesville, Va., with white nationalists, neo-Nazis and their supportersÂ pitted against left-wing counter-protesters. At issue: the removal of Confederate statues. The clashesÂ resulted in the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer, who was killed when a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove his car into a crowd.

The president’s initial response was to blame “both sides.” After some backlash, the president declared racism “evil” in a second statement made Monday.Â But then, in a combative press conference on Tuesday, Trump seemed to double down on his first reaction. He said there were “very fine people” on both sides. Meaning…there were “very fine people” aligned with the white supremacists. He also charged that the “alt-left” was just as much to blame.

The fallout has since continued, with CEOS resigning from his advisory councils, a mass resignation from the presidential arts committee, Republicans denouncing the president’s comments, Democrats calling for his censure and even one Democrat saying that this warrants impeachment.