Trump’s Campaign Team Belongs To Anti-LGBT, Anti-Immigrant Hate Group

Donald Trump continues to try to dupe gays into supporting him despite the pact that he made with a veritable who's who of American Christofascists and anti-gay hate groups. Likewise, with his trip to Mexico today, he seemingly is seeking to fool those offended by his strident anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic demagoguery.   As part of this Trojan Horse effort, Trump shook up his campaign's leadership and brought in Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon.  Now it turns out that both Conway and Bannon are members of the secretive Council for National Policy ("CNP").  What is frightening about CPC is the many extremists who belong to the organization and the hatred that is their stock in trade.   The Southern Poverty Law Center ("SPLC") - which tracks hate groups across the nation - has a report on CPC and Bannon and Conway's membership.  Here are excerpts:

Longtime Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News operation, were named on Aug. 17 as, respectively, the Trump campaign’s manager and its chief executive officer. The appointment of Bannon was by far the more controversial choice, given his role at a “news” outlet known for bashing immigrants, Muslims, women and others.

The Council for National Policy ("CNP") is an intensely secretive and shadowy group of what The New York Times once described as “the most powerful conservatives in the country.” It is so tight-lipped that it tells people not to admit their membership or even name the group. Revealing when or where the group meets, or what it discusses, is also forbidden. The organization, which can only be joined by invitation and at a cost of thousands of dollars, strives mightily to keep its membership rolls secret.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which publishes Hatewatch, obtained a copy this spring of the CNP’s 2014 membership directory, a closely held document. It shows that Conway was a member of the CNP’s executive committee that year, and that Bannon was a regular member. It is not known if they remain.

They include people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama “birther” and the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.

The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it . . . . as for the many real extremists who are included. . . . people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law.”

The revelation of Conway and Bannon’s CNP memberships comes at a time when the Trump campaign has suffered a number of reverses and internal problems. 

Bannon is in some ways even more controversial. His Breitbart news operation has specialized in extreme-right propaganda that  . . . recently published a defense of the “Alternative Right” that included defending well-known white supremacist ideologues Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer.

[T]he SPLC concluded in its May report on the CNP: “At a time of extreme political polarization in our society, in the middle of an ugly presidential contest which has featured an almost unsurpassed record of ethnic, racial and sexual insults and lies, Americans deserve to know who their ostensible leaders are mixing with as we collectively decide our country’s future.”

Anyone who falls for Trump's effort to pretend his has moderated his positions is, in my view, nothing less than a fool and an idiot. 

Trump’s Repellent Inner Circle

While Donald Trump has shaken up the management of his campaign, overall, the leadership remains driven by bigotry and misogyny.  Indeed, Trump's new campaign chair, Stephen Bannon, as reported by the Washington Post, is now being plagued by stories of (i) being registered to vote at an address where he does not live, (ii) past domestic violence, and (iii) anti-Semitism.  The Donald certainly knows how to pick winners, especially since Bannon was supposed to be an improvement over Russia linked Paul Manafort.  A column in the Washington Post (bu a conservative columnist) looks mare and Trump's  ugly inner circle.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump is undergoing his own “extreme vetting.” And we are learning a great deal about the quality of his public pledges. . . . Trump is undergoing a rapid, convulsive transition from Mr. Hyde into Dr. Jekyll. In the movies, this role would require hours in the chair of a highly skilled makeup artist. Trump has Sean Hannity.

For much of Trump’s fan base, these details couldn’t matter less. The Trump revolution is mainly a matter of personnel, not policy. Put the right man in charge who will hire the “best people” and fire all the corrupt, stupid failures. Trump’s primary appeal — and his main source of self-regard — is his skill as a negotiator, manager and talent scout.

Here we are also getting a good feel for the candidate. Trump’s campaign has been a roiling, noxious, dysfunctional mess from the start, characterized by public feuds, subject to sudden leadership changes and unable to fulfill key functions (like actually having a campaign apparatus in key states). And Trump’s personnel selections have been both instructive and disastrous.

Consider this list of Trump’s chosen: Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had a brutal and demeaning style that resulted in a staff revolt, and his manhandling of a female reporter overshadowed the Trump campaign for weeks. Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was paid lucrative consulting fees by foreign interests and resigned after reports that Ukraine anti-corruption investigators were scrutinizing millions in alleged payments there.

Longtime adviser Roger Stone is a crackpot conspiracy theorist who asserts that Bill and Hillary Clinton are “plausibly responsible” for the deaths of roughly 40 people and that Hillary Clinton should be “executed for murder.” Confidant Roger Ailes recently stepped down from his job at Fox News under a cloud of sexual harassment claims. And Steve Bannon, Trump’s new campaign chief executive, is known for his bullying tactics and for running a website (Breitbart News) that flirts with white nationalism.

There are a few exceptions to this pattern — Kellyanne Conway and Mike Pencecome to mind — but Trump has hired and elevated some of the very worst people in American politics, known for their cruelty, radicalism, prejudice and corruption.

What does all this say about Trump as a prospective president?

First, it means that the ideal of leadership Trump displayed as a reality television star is his actual view of leadership. It is not an act. In Trump’s view, leaders elevate themselves by belittling others. They yell and abuse and bully. And their most important quality is absolute loyalty to the great leader, the star of the show. This is a view of leadership that would make H.R. Haldeman cringe.

Trump's New Campaign Leaders Are Rabidly Anti-LGBT

Homophobes Kellyane Conway and Stephen Bannon

While The Donald continues to pretend to be gay friendly and some gay Republicans continue to keep their heads firmly up their asses and support the man, his picks for the new leaders of his campaign tell the true story.  Both Stephen Bannon of Breitbart News and GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway have a history of being rabidly anti-gay.  As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words and Trump's picks speak volumes.   The New Civil Rights Movement looks at the history of anti-LGBT actions of Bannon and Conway.  Here are story highlights:

Donald Trump wrote on Facebook late Tuesday that he'll "fight to ensure that every American is treated equally" and "reject bigotry and hatred and oppression in all its forms." 

Hours later, it was revealed that Trump is shaking up his campaign, naming Breitbart News head Stephen Bannon as executive director, and GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway as manager.   As it turns out, those appointments aren't exactly consistent with Trump's Facebook post. 

As recently as May, Bannon railed against transgender rights during an interview with the American Family Association's Sandy Rios. According to Right Wing Watch, Bannon accused retailer Target of “trying to exclude people who are decent, hard-working people who don’t want their four-year-old daughter to have to go into a bathroom with a guy with a beard in a dress.”

Media Matters has more on Breitbart News' penchant for anti-LGBT reporting:   

Breitbart.com regularly publishes articles with anti-LGBT slurs “trannies” and “faggot” in headlines. Breitbart contributor Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) -- an organization designated as an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center -- is largely the face of Breitbart’s anti-LGBT coverage.

Meanwhile, Conway is a longtime pollster for the anti-LGBTQ National Organization for Marriage, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

In September 2014, Conway appeared on a panel with former NOM President Maggie Gallagher, where they encouraged Libertarians to take up socially conservative causes, Right Wing Watch reports: 

Conway told the crowd that “values voters and libertarians have a great deal in common” from opposition to “big government” and abortion rights to being “sick of lawyers in black robes making stuff up” to a refusal to “redefine” family to be “whatever feels cool.” She also saw an opening to win over libertarians with the Religious Right’s increasing reliance on persecution rhetoric, or what she called the “assault on religious liberty in so many parts of our culture.”

Expect the Trump Campaign to Get Even More Extreme

Part of what has lead the Republican Party to be now controlled by an out of control and down right ugly party base has been the rise of extreme right wing talk radio and similar "news" sites and outlets. These microphone jockeys and "journalists" care little about objective reality and focus on what will most excite the prejudices and paranoia of their listeners.  Hence why one study found that those who watch Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, were found to be the least informed - even less informed than those who watched little or no news at all.  Now, Donald Trump's campaign is going to be under the control and guidance of one of the mavens of the most extreme such faux news sites, Breitbart News.  A column in the Washington Post looks at how the GOP's craziness is likely about to get far more insane.  Here are excerpts:

Shaken by the fact that he’s losing, Donald Trump has fled into the parallel universe of the extreme right — and apparently plans to stay there for the remainder of the campaign. Let’s see if the rest of the Republican Party is dumb enough to follow him.

Trump has reportedly been feeling “boxed in” and “controlled” by the few people around him who actually know something about politics. Advice from these professionals to tone it down must be responsible for his slide in the polls, he seems to believe. So he has hired as chief executive of his campaign a man named Stephen Bannon, who will not only let Trump be Trump but also encourage him to be even Trumpier.

Bannon runs Breitbart News, a website that creates its own ultranationalist far-right reality — one that often bears little resemblance to the world as it really is. 

The site’s since-deceased founder, Andrew Breitbart, once “described Bannon, with sincere admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement,” according to a Bloomberg News profile. Riefenstahl was the brilliant filmmaker who became one of Hitler’s most effective propagandists. I think the comparison is wrong; Bannon is not nearly as talented.

He is a practiced provocateur, however, with a gift for reinforcing the worldview of far-right true believers. Bannon gives readers the impression that the nation is in grave and imminent peril, that Muslims are conspiring to impose sharia law throughout the land, that Mexican immigrants are running rampant in a wild crime spree, that only Trump can save us — and that polls showing him far behind Clinton are somehow skewed, incompetent or irrelevant.

It’s all a paranoid fantasy, designed to exploit anxieties about demographic and economic change. And Trump has decided that his best chance of winning is to peddle this garbage, some of which he may actually believe.

So if anyone was wondering whether this election cycle could get any worse for the GOP, it just did.

It now appears to be a good bet that Republicans will lose control of the Senate. It is far too early to predict a “wave” election that might threaten the GOP’s big majority in the House, but Democrats are allowing themselves to dream. For Republicans, the two most likely outcomes of the election are bad and worse.

Trump’s decision to throw in with the likes of Bannon can only increase the probability of a GOP debacle. Does it have to be spelled out for you in neon lights, Republicans? Trump could not care less about the party, and he would happily destroy it to feed his own ego.

Bannon, likewise, appears to view the party of Lincoln as merely a vehicle for his own ambition, which is to nurture and grow a nationalist-right movement. His website is as critical of the Republican establishment as it is of the Democrats. He has no interest in making Trump more palatable to the general electorate. 

It was perhaps foolish of me to hope that very many Republican elected officials would reject Trump on principle. But now, perhaps, more will do so for reasons of self-preservation.

Trump has made his decision. In a town hall meeting this week moderated by Sean Hannity of Fox News, Trump ignored opportunities to embrace traditional American values and instead reinforced a message of nationalism, xenophobia and fear. He offered himself as the only solution, promising, like any tinhorn strongman, that “I have as big a heart as anybody.”

But there is no room in that heart for the GOP. Trump won’t save you, Republicans. You had better save yourselves.

 The GOP establishment is now truly reaping what it has sown by years of winking and nodding to insane elements of society, including the Christofascists, white supremacists and the outright crazy. Trump is the embodiment of it all and Bannon  will make the lunacy even worse.  I for one have no sympathy - all of this could have been avoid if the leadership had had a spine and not welcomed these horrible people into the party.