Given the blizzard of activity during the first two weeks at the White House, it's been easy to overlook who is actually running the White House.

That would be Steve Bannon - unelected, unvetted, and unhinged - the guy who wants to "destroy the state, bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment," as he prophesied in a Daily Beast profile two years back.

He's taken control of both policy and process, which Americans should find terrifying. Bannon's paw prints have been on everything in the first two weeks of the Trump administration, according to most reports - the foreboding speech about American carnage, the immigration ban fiasco, the movement away from trade agreements, the perpetual hostility. His ideas fill the oval office every day.

And now, as a fitting side show to this government burlesque, Bannon has been put on the National Security Council.

New Jersey's senators say they are looking into whether his appointment violates a federal statute, because urgent decisions about our national security probably shouldn't be left to political strategists with the world view of an uber-nationalist.

Bannon believes the U.S. will be at war with China "in the next five or 10 years." That we are in a "global existential struggle" with Islam that will lead to "a major shooting war in the Middle East." And that Christianity "is dying in Europe and Islam is on the rise," which he equates to "looking down the barrel of fascism."

Those are just a few geopolitical brain drops uncovered by USA Today's review of Breitbart radio shows hosted by Bannon. You'd think his zeal for religious wars and conflicts with nations that have 2.3 million active enemy troops would be a deal breaker, and people in the national security business would tend to agree.

But on Saturday, Donald Trump signed a memorandum that restructured the NSC. It added Bannon to the Principals committee, while demoting the Joint Chiefs chairman and the Director of National Intelligence to attend only "where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed."

It was an unprecedented act. And it raised alarms throughout the security community, which wanted to know why the president would replace seasoned foreign policy advisors with a political provocateur?

Robert Gates, the former Defense Secretary, says that it's "a big mistake." Susan Rice, the former National Security Advisor, called it "Stone cold crazy."

Some argue that a civilian like Bannon should go through Senate confirmation, but nothing in the National Security Act dictates who sits on the Principals committee, a "Cabinet-level interagency forum for considering policy issues."

The head-scratcher is that a fake news peddler, who ran the website favored by neo-Nazis recast as the "alt-Right," gets to play general while ranking military and intelligence officials lose their permanent status.

Clearly, common sense suggests the Senate should get to know him better.

It's worth repeating that Bannon was not merely a token hire for the rumpled Right. He is the champion of white grievance politics favored by the KKK and ethno-nationalists, brought in to run Donald Trump's policy shop. He has already helped transform the Republican party - sending the likes of Eric Cantor, John Boehner, and Jeb Bush into retirement - and his influence on the president is irrefutable.

Now, he has equal status of the men running the State Department and the Pentagon. If Russia rolls a division of T-72s into Estonia tomorrow, Bannon would help guide the president's policy action - a Catch-22 sequel if we ever heard one, and a reminder that the NSC is one place where you won't want an echo chamber.

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