Trevor Noah just pulled a Henry Louis Gates on Steve Bannon.
After watching the former White House chief strategist’s combative appearance on 60 Minutes Sunday night, in which he criticized President Trump’s handling of the DACA issue, The Daily Show did some digging and came up with Bannon’s great-great grandfather’s immigration history.
In the CBS interview, when Charlie Rose tried to point out that everyone in this country, outside of Native Americans, could be considered an immigrant, Bannon accused of him of pushing “leftist” propaganda. “America is built on our citizens,” Bannon said. “Look at the 19th century, the control of borders. Economic nationalism is what this country was built on.”
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Noah noted that in the recipe of what made America, Bannon seemed to forget slavery. “You see what happened, there, my friends?” he asked. “They took down the statutes and Steve Bannon forgot the history. They were right.”
“I don’t know why he’s fighting about this, we all know America is a nation of immigrants,” Noah said. “But, just for fun, we called a professional genealogist who found out that Steve Bannon’s great-great-grandfather, Lawrence Bannon, arrived in the U.S. from Ireland by the 1850s, at a time when America’s borders were so open that Irishmen could walk into the country with no passports, no visas, no background checks of any kind.”
“So in many ways, Steve Bannon’s great-grandfather was a DREAMer,” he added. “Yeah, and his great-grandson is a fucking nightmare.”