Steve Bannon insists white supremacist support for Trump '100 percent media fabrication'

Steve Bannon insists President Donald Trump's appeal to white supremacists is just a "media fabrication."

The president's former chief strategist and campaign manager gave a lengthy interview to the New York Times, whose reporters asked him to explain whether Trump had intentionally or inadvertently appealed to white nationalists.

Bannon, who runs a Breitbart News website that tagged "black crime" stories, said it's simply "nonsense" that Trump appeals to racists.

"I think these guys grab on to anything they can," Bannon said. "No, the message is one of, this guy is the least racist guy I’ve ever met. And nothing in the campaign, and nothing that he’s done to date. That’s all that’s all left wing. That’s MSNBC nonsense. And by the way, you can’t help with a couple of, these guys are marginalia to marginalia. Right? So they’ll grab onto anything — and by the way, every time they say Trump’s name, MSNBC has got a camera on it and the New York Times has an article on it, right? Because you’re obsessed with it."

Bannon described his Breitbart website in August 2016 as "the platform for the alt-right," a rebranded euphemism for organized white supremacists, and recently revealed emails show how he used Robert Mercer's billions to push plainly racist views into the political mainstream.

But he insisted to incredulous Times reporters that the media had fabricated white supremacist support for Trump, whose name they chanted at a violent rally in Charlottesville.

"Absolutely, a hundred percent it’s a hundred percent media fabrication," Bannon said, "and, by the way, because they realize that they think the only way they can run is by smearing you to be a nativist, a misogynist, a racist, a homophobe. Just go down the line."