Vox links of interest

Decline of the West Wing

 Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

• President-elect Donald Trump has announced the first two staff hires of his incoming administration: Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus will be his chief of staff, and Breitbart publisher Stephen Bannon (a rumored contender for the chief of staff job) will be an "equal partner" to Priebus under the title of "chief strategist and senior counselor." [CNN / Jim Acosta, Dana Bash, and Tal Kopan]
• Priebus is an odd choice for chief of staff, since he, like Trump, has no experience in the federal government — and since he did not exactly appear to have a lot of influence over Trump during the campaign. [Vox / Matt Yglesias]
• But Priebus is flying under the radar compared with Bannon, who is as responsible as anyone for the resurgence of white supremacism under the mantle of the "alt-right." [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]
• This isn't a "liberals call everything racist" thing. This is a "the American Nazi Party, which was convinced Trump was going to sell them out, are heartened by Bannon's hire and think Trump might be for real" thing. [CNN / Andrew Kaczynscki and Chris Massie]
• It is a "National Review columnists are straight-up condemning one of the Republican president-elect's first hires" thing. [National Review / Jonah Goldberg]
• The urge to condemn Bannon's hire — to fight the anticipated "normalization" of Bannon's ideology and Trump's platform — is mostly getting expressed so far in criticism of media for not being explicit enough in calling racism a bad thing, and in calls to Congress for members to denounce Bannon. (Since he's not in a Senate-confirmable position, "denounce" is the best that callers can ask for.) [Just Security / Rebecca Hamilton]
• The problem with putting pressure on politicians to denounce and de-"normalize" Trump and his administration, though, is that constitutional norms require them to treat him as legitimate, insofar as he won a presidential election and that automatically grants him a serious amount of power. [Washington Post / Andrew Sabl]
• This might be why President Obama, who delivered the 2016 campaign's sickest anti-Trump burns, is now refusing to comment on Bannon's hire or Trump's readiness for office, in the name of a smooth transition of power. [Washington Post / Juliet Eilperin and Greg Jaffe]