he s not afraid to confront orthodoxy, a first-rate pick. he s written a book critical of u.s. generals for not taking a tougher line with political bosses during the vietnam war. i m wondering how that may play out. i think he s going to have three challenges as he assumes this job. one is to make sure all the other agencies are really around the table. the state department, joint chiefs, energy, they haven t been there to date. second, he needs to make sure that the national security council staff is looped in and listened to. they ve been marginalized. but third, they need to check politics at the situation room door. having mr. bannon in the situation room at the table as a co-equal to the secretary of defense, secretary of state, that s wrong place to go. and on top of that, there are reports that he s been running a parallel process, divorce from
trump s national security council was shaping up. how do you she ee it shaping up with general mcmaster? i agree, give cadiredit wher credit is due, but whether this is an end of the war led by bannon or is this just replacing one general for another. in terms of having someone who respects process and is not bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, it is very important that agencies like dhs, d.o.d. have a seat at the table so they can give the best advice to the president of the united states. that is what the staff is all about. we simply don t know at this stage what deals were made to get him on board or whether bannon is going to keep running this parallel process. and you re going to have their madness that we ve seen so part
young he was. obama understood that he needed to surround himself with people who also had more experience and he knew that from president lincoln, who he had idolized. he had called me up and told me he had read team of rivals , and we have to talk. so he brought me down to washington to talk about how can a man be a good president and a great president. how could a man forget people who had hurt him. and when he reached out to hillary clinton he knew he was putting his chief rival into that most important position, secretary of state, just as lincoln had. inauguration day, there was a sense of both history, the first african-american president taking office that was kind of electric. and also a sense of concern about the extraordinary crisis that we were in, economic crisis. every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.
supremacist by hiring steve bannon. what s your perception? we ve talked a lot about steve bannon. i m like look, it is very fair to say that breitbart, his website traffics in anti-semitic stereotypeses, about people of color, bannon has been a geis divisive figure. whether bannon himself holds these views i think is still sort of up for debate. i m trying to research into it as much as i can. to jennifer palmieri s point, look, they have a point that the trump campaign was very divisive and i think some of the responses that were reported out by kellyanne conway for instance in that same forum that democrats didn t do a great job of messaging also is a point. you could go back and forth on this endlessly. democrats need a shakeup. whatever they re saying now they need to move forward and think about 2018, 2020. time to move on. yeah.
words you might give. i will say, don, i i this the discussion about whether bannon is an anti-semite or a white supremacist. all of that is off the point. the real question is, what are the ideas in a our leaders advance. and our leaders now are advancing ideas at least with the appointment of steve bannon who advanced the ideas of the alt-right as a part of breitbart are advancing ideas which are destructive. it s hard to say, to look into a man s heart and say exactly what they believe or feel, we ll never know, but it s about the ideas that they advance. one thing is very clear, steve bannon has advanced ideas of the alt right, he knows his business has been setting up or furthering a platform for their ideas, and donald trump has got to repudiate that, and it s not possible to do that, if steve bannon s your chief strategist.