Trump's Charlottesville Press Conference 5

[5]

QUESTION: Can you tell us how you're feeling about your chief strategist, Mr. Bannon? Can you talk about that?
TRUMP: Go ahead.
QUESTION: I would echo Maggie's (ph) question. Steve Bannon...
TRUMP: I never spoke to Mr. Bannon about it.
QUESTION: But can you tell us broadly what you're – do you still have confidence in Steve (ph)?
TRUMP: Well, we see (ph) – and look, look. I like Mr. Bannon. He's a friend of mine. But Mr. Bannon came on very late, you know that. I went through 17 senators, governors, and I won all the primaries. Mr. Bannon came on very much later than that, and I like him. He's a good man. He is not a racist, I can tell you that. He's a good person. He actually gets a very unfair press in that regard.
But we'll see what happens with Mr. Bannon, but he's a good person, and I think the press treats him, frankly, very unfairly.
QUESTION: Do you have confidence in him? Because he has called on you to defend your national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, against...
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: I've already done it. I did it the last time.
QUESTION: And he called on it again (ph) linking this (ph)...
TRUMP: Senator McCain?
QUESTION: ...the alt-right and...
TRUMP: Senator McCain, you mean the one who voted against Obamacare? Who is – you mean Senator McCain who voted against us getting good healthcare?
QUESTION: Senator McCain said that the alt-right is behind these attacks, and he linked that same group to those who perpetrated the attack in Charlottesville.
TRUMP: Well, I don't know – I can't tell you. I'm sure Senator McCain must know what he's talking about. But when you say the "alt- right," define "alt-right" to me. You define it, go ahead.
QUESTION: Well, I think that (ph)...
TRUMP: No, define it for me, come on. Let's go. Define it for me.
QUESTION: Senator McCain defined them as the same group...

   So Bannon. I don't really know. Seems like not a great sign. But not bad enough to warrant the Monster Trump hypothesis. I don't really know anything about Bannon, but if there's any serious concern that he's sympathetic to racialists, he should go, obviously
   Alt-Right. Hell, I don't know what the Alt-Right is. I'm pretty sure that some of the Alt-Right is, as I've said before, young males poking at whoever the most prominent, most sanctimonious assholes are. In my youth it was the Moral Majority / religious right. Now it's the PC left. But apparently the "Alt-Right" shades off into white supremacists. I'm inclined to think that playing around with Nazi iconography and crap like that is, at least in part, the contemporary version of adolescent Satanism.
   But, more importantly: why is a reporter asking the POTUS to define a term in the middle of a presser?
   Trump should have let the guy trip himself up, because he doesn't know either. He was about to say something like "Senator McCain defined the Alt-Right as being the group that protested in C'ville. Which is not a definition. But Trump couldn't keep his mouth shut long enough to let the guy hang himself.
   Not really a whole lot to see here.