Trump’s New CEO Bannon Addressed Working Women as Dykes
Donald Trump has cycled through a series of campaign leaders, each brought on to remedy the Republican nominee’s head-spinning presidential bid, but each turning into a headache himself. The latest campaign savior turned liability is former Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon, who Trump named his campaign C.E.O. earlier this month. The campaign shake-up, which included the elevation of G.O.P. pollster Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager, was at the time seen as both a slight and solution to Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, who was drawing unwanted attention over his controversial business ties to Russia and Ukraine. But in the two weeks since Bannon took the helm, Trump’s campaign has been rocked by a string of allegations against the media firebrand, including a decades-old domestic-abuse charge. And the bad press isn’t stopping.
The latest of Bannon’s past transgressions to come to light is a comment he made in a five-year-old interview, in which he calls progressive women “dykes.” In a 2011 radio interview with Political Vindication Radio, Bannon said that conservative women—such as Ann Coulter, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin—are an “existential threat to the progressive narrative” and as a result “there are some unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement. That, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children,” he said, as BuzzFeed News first reported. “They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England. That drives the left insane and that’s why they hate these women,” Bannon continued.
The newly surfaced remark by Trump’s campaign C.E.O. is just one of several past controversial comments that have recently surfaced. Days before BuzzFeed News published the 2011 radio recording, the outlet reported that Bannon’s ex-wife had accused him of making anti-Semitic comments, citing court filings from the estranged couple’s divorce proceedings. “He said that he doesn’t like Jews and that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls to go to school with Jews,” Bannon’s ex-wife, Mary Louise Piccard, reportedly claimed in the filings. (A spokesperson for Bannon told BuzzFeed that he never made the comments.) Earlier, Politico published a police report filed against the former media executive, wherein his then wife, Piccard, detailed an alleged domestic-violence incident in which she claimed Bannon grabbed her neck and broke her phone. Bannon was charged with battery, dissuading a witness, and misdemeanor domestic violence in 1996, but the charges against him were dropped when Piccard didn’t show up in court, Politico reports. (A spokesperson told Politico that Bannon pleaded not guilty to the charges and was never interviewed by the police.)
As Bannon’s past has come back to haunt him, the Trump campaign has begun to distance itself from the chief executive. When asked about Bannon and his connections to the controversial “alt-right” movement in an interview on Fox News Sunday this past weekend, Conway remarked that Trump “chose me to manage his campaign, and I report directly to him.” Chairman of the Republican National Committee Reince Priebus evinced a similar ambivalence toward Bannon in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press. “I think Kellyanne is doing a phenomenal job. I don’t know Steve Bannon, to tell you the truth, very well,” he said when asked about personnel issues within the Trump campaign. If Bannon’s troubles continue, he, like his predecessors Manafort and Corey Lewandowski, might not last long on the Trump campaign.
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