Nancy Pelosi Calls for Firing of Steve Bannon After Charlottesville Attack
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called for White House chief strategist Steve Bannon to be fired in a statement following Saturday’s terror attack in Charlottesville, in which a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of protestors, killing one person and injuring 19 others.
Bannon’s standing in the White House, as the former chairman of Breitbart News — a website he once described as “the platform of the alt-right” — has drawn intense criticism from Democratic lawmakers since President Donald Trump’s inauguration. And this isn’t the first time Pelosi has called for his ousting.
But in light of the terror attack at the Virginia white supremacist rally, and Trump’s ambiguous statement in response to the incident, calls to purge the White House of its far-right staffers have re-ignited — as #FireBannon trends on Twitter.
In Pelosi’s statement, she claims that Trump’s equivocations in his initial statement on the attack are “a direct reflection of the fact that his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is an alt-right white supremacist sympathizer and a shameless enforcer of those un-American beliefs.”
Trump on Monday delivered remarks from the Roosevelt Room explicitly condemning the “KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups” — though critics dismissed his comments as coming days late.
Pelosi called the comments “long overdue,” before noting that if “the President is sincere about rejecting white supremacists, he should remove all doubt by firing Steve Bannon and the other alt-right white supremacist sympathizers in the White House.”
Read the statement below:
If @realDonaldTrump is sincere about rejecting alt-right white supremacists sympathizers, he should start at the White House. #FireBannon pic.twitter.com/m2bfps3Q5g
— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) August 14, 2017
[image via screengrab]
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