Steve Bannon's Days in the White House Are Reportedly Numbered

Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.

Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media magnate, has repeatedly urged President Trump to axe top adviser Steve Bannon, the ex-Breitbart chief credited with nurturing Trump’s love affair with the racist alt-right.

As The New York Times reported on Monday, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, has refused to say that he could work with Bannon. During a Monday night appearance on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, Anthony Scaramucci, the administration’s shortest public hire yet, said of Bannon: “If it was up to me, he would be gone.”

Although Trump has been weighing whether to fire his top adviser for months, he’s recently sent Bannon on an “internal exile,” according to the Times, and hasn’t met with the man who was once an Oval Office fixture for more than a week.

Bannon, who is 63 but looks like he’s literally decomposing in office, has reportedly told those closest to him that he never expected to hang onto the job for more than eight months or a year, but would try to get as much of his reactionary legislative agenda as possible passed during that time.

Et tu, Steve?

WHAT ELSE?

• Taylor Swift won her case against the DJ who groped her during a photo op before a 2013 concert. The jury awarded her a symbolic $1 in damages.
• White supremacist Richard Spencer said that Trump didn’t condemn white supremacists in his statement from the White House yesterday. “Only a dumb person would take those lines seriously,” Spencer said in a press conference.
• Seth Meyers delivered a powerful message about Charlottesville and Trump on his show last night, saying the president has always been “racist and insane.”