In the November 14 NY Times, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway denied that chief strategist Steve Bannon had a connection to right wing nationalists, or that he would bring those views into the Trump White House. Conway's protestations were as believable as Newt Gingrich, who asserted at about the same time that Bannon could not hold anti-Semitic views because he had worked at Goldman Sachs and in Hollywood.
Earlier this year the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) revealed that Conway and Bannon were both members of the Council for National Policy, an association of conservatives so secretive that members may not divulge their membership or even the name of the group. Records from 2014 obtained by SPLC listed Conway as a member of the executive committee and Bannon as a regular member.
Speaking at an event on September 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton said:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
The Trump campaign criticized Clinton's remarks at the time, but it has become increasingly clear that Trump has not only "lifted up" the deplorables, he is enlisting them to build the executive branch of the government.
"What's past is prologue," Antonio tells Sebastian in Act 2 Scene 1 of Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Inscribed on the National Archive building, the phrase has come to mean that history provides a context for the present.
In this section we'll look to the past, to gain perspective both on Trump and his family, but also the political context that led to our current predicament.
