In a recent social media post, Rep. Karen Bass (D-Culver City) made her feelings clear about the cabinet appointments and campaign rhetoric of President-elect Donald Trump could portend for African-Americans over the next four years.
One appointment Bass strongly questioned was Trump naming of Stephen Bannon, the editor of the right-wing website Breitbart News, as his chief White House strategist.
Bannon is a controversial figure whose opponents note that he himself called his website a “platform for the alt-right” and has run multiple sensationalist headlines that critics say are racist and anti-Semitic.
“He’s an open anti-Semite. This is who he is bringing in to the Oval Office?” asked the congresswoman during a 17-minute video posted to Facebook and Twitter on Nov. 15, a week after Trump’s stunning election win.
Bass, who was reelected on Nov. 8, also touched on Trump’s embrace of the controversial “stop and frisk” policing technique used in New York several years ago as well as his campaign rhetoric about how nearly all African-Americans live in poverty-stricken, crime-ridden communities.
“He clearly has spent little to no time in any inner-city community,” she said. “We will resist every step of the way Donald Trump moving our country backwards.”
Members of California’s female delegation pledged to fight the president-elect on reproductive rights after Trump announced in an interview on “60 Minutes” that he planned to nominate Supreme Court justices who might overturn the landmark ruling Roe vs. Wade, even as he claims not to have strong opinions on abortion.
“President-elect Trump’s statements and policies threaten to restrict our freedoms, cut off our healthcare, affect our economy and the pocketbooks of working families, and drag us back to an era of back alley abortions,” said state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) in a statement on Nov. 16.
Jackson is the chairwoman of the California Legislative Women’s Caucus.