On Sunday night, former White House strategist Steve Bannon did much to scare viewers of "60 Minutes" and very little to hide his pernicious white nationalism. It was a prime moment for the sharp talons of late-night TV.
"The Daily Show" host Trevor Noah began his monologue Monday by playing a clip from Bannon's interview with Charlie Rose. Bannon said he didn't care if the mainstream media called him an anti-Semite or a racist. “Wow, it’s like Donald Trump took a dump while he was tweeting, and then wished for that dump to be a real boy,” Noah said.
Later in the "60 Minutes" interview, Bannon accused Rose of touting a liberal line by insisting that immigrants and people of color had contributed to the growth and prosperity of America. "In the recipe of how to make America, I feel like Steve Bannon left out a crucial ingredient . . . Slavery" Noah said. "They took down the statues and Steve Bannon forgot the history."
Noah said that he reached out to a professional genealogist who found out that Bannon's great-great grandfather Lawrence Bannon arrived in the U.S. from Ireland by the 1850s, "at a time when America's borders were so open that Irishmen could walk into the country with no passports, no visas, no background checks of any kind." He added, "So, in many ways, Steve Bannon's great grandfather was a DREAMer . . . and his great grandson is a f**king nightmare.”
"Late Night" host Seth Meyers also took a closer look at Bannon's "60 Minutes" interview. Meyers first highlighted the part of the interview in which Bannon refuted the notion that Hillary Clinton was smarter than Trump. "Everyone says she's so much smarter than Donald Trump," Bannon incredulously said at one point in his interview. "Yeah, everybody is right," Meyers agreed. "Of course Hillary Clinton is smarter than Donald Trump. She's a graduate of Yale Law, a former senator and Secretary of State. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure Trump thinks Frederick Douglass was in Boyz II Men."
As much as the Republican establishment may resist, the GOP is very much the party of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, Meyers said, which was why the late-night host was somewhat confused that the media was trying to portray Trump as an independent. "Donald Trump is not an independent," Meyers insisted. "The only thing he's independent of is reality."
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