Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) slammed Donald Trump for his appointment of Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon as chief strategist, saying Tuesday that Bannon’s place in the incoming administration shows that a Trump White House will “embrace bigotry.”
Warren discussed Bannon’s appointment during The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council event in Washington, D.C.. Warren criticized the decision, saying that it’s not what the American people asked for.
“This is a man who says, by his very presence, that this is a White House that will embrace bigotry,” Warren said, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal.
“People didn’t vote for Trump so that he could bring a white supremacist into the White House,” she said later.
Bannon’s appointment has caused backlash from those who believe he’d inject the alt-right’s unique blend of white nationalism, anti-Semitism and misogyny into the Trump administration. But so far many Republican leaders have been publicly supportive of his appointment.
Warren went on to say that businesses should not reflect the rhetoric of Trump and Bannon, telling leaders that “bigotry is bad for business,” according to the Journal.
“I just want to underline something that every one of you know: bigotry is bad for business. Bigotry is not what your employees expect. Bigotry is not what your customers expect,” she said. “And if that’s the direction that this administration goes, that creates a real problem for everyone.”
Warren also took Trump to task for claiming to “drain the swamp” during his campaign while staffing his transition team with Washington lobbyists.
“What Donald Trump is doing is that he’s putting together a transition team that’s full of lobbyists — the kind of people he actually ran against,” Warren said, according to the paper.
