With Donald Trump’s decisive Election Night victory in the history books, the professional left has set its sights on a new target - President elect Trump’s first White House staff choice, former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon. The left is hoping, through smear campaigns, to remove Bannon from the post before his job with the new administration even begins.

The left must not be allowed to succeed, for two reasons, both personal and political: First, because what they are saying about Bannon is not true, and it would simply be wrong to deny a president the service of a man he wants on the basis of falsehoods; second, because allowing them to succeed in their mission of personal destruction would send a terrible signal that President Trump can be rolled right from the start.

Consequently, conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters must recognize what’s at stake, and defend Trump’s choice.

I’ve known Steve Bannon since the early days of the tea party movement, and I know what they are saying about him is not true.

The weekend Obamacare passed in the House, 50,000 of us gathered on the West Lawn of the Capitol to protest. Rep. Michele Bachmann helped us call the protest, and many Republican Congressmen and Senators, doctors like Dr. Milton Wolf, and celebrities like Jon Voight and Mark Levin joined us in urging Congress not to pass the bill.

Among those present was a man filming Michele Bachmann for a documentary film. He introduced himself, told me he would be filming the protest, and afterward asked me to be in the documentary as well. Honestly, by the end of the weekend, I was wary of giving any trust to him and others because over the course of that weekend, I learned how hate-filled the left can be.

It was this weekend that the tea party movement went from being ridiculed to be being attacked. It was this weekend that the left began claiming the tea party movement was racist. No one ever offered proof of this allegation, even after Andrew Breitbart put up a $100,000 reward looking for evidence to back up the left’s claim. I later learned it was that documentary filmmaker - Steve Bannon - who helped back up the reward.

Steve was there and saw we were not racist but peaceful, polite, and impeccably clean protesters. (We have a reputation for cleaning the West Lawn to leave it better than when we arrived.) Steve stood by us and worked to show the falsehoods in the left’s claims. Since then, he has been a loyal ally and a good friend to the tea party movement.

Now these same attacks are being lobbed at Steve Bannon. He is being called an anti-Semite - despite the fact that he was in business with Andrew Breitbart, Larry Solov and Joel Pollak (all three are Jewish), and he ensured breitbart.com opened an Israel bureau, which had been a dream of Andrew Breitbart’s.

He is being called a “goon,” and some even suggest he is not wise enough to have the White House Chief Strategist position - despite the fact that he was a naval officer and a managing partner at Goldman Sachs.

Despite their wailing and shrieking, the professional left has targeted Bannon not because he has no experience in politics, but for precisely the opposite reason - because they know he possesses an incisive understanding of the inner workings of Washington, D.C., and how the city works on behalf of its Establishment, to the exclusion of the broader American citizenry. Just watch his documentary “Generation Zero,” or the “Boomtown” episodes he helped air on Sean Hannity’s show in 2012. He understands how Washington works, and they know he will be President Trump’s closest adviser to break up business as usual - and, therefore, they’re determined to stop him.

President-elect Trump won the election, in the end, because he took his own counsel. He saw something in the American electorate that all the Establishment pundits and prognosticators missed, and he plowed ahead, undeterred, confident that he and the people on whom he relied had it right, while the Establishment was wrong.

Steve Bannon was one of those people on whom the President-elect relied. He is a good man who is being unjustly and unfairly targeted with falsehoods. Trump should hold firm, and his supporters should hold firm, as well.

If the political left prevails in forcing President-elect Trump to abandon one of his most effective and trusted confidantes, it will set up a dangerous precedent that the left can dictate not only the staffing decisions at the White House, but also the policy agenda.

And that, make no mistake about it, is the left’s real objective here.

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