There’s an argument to be made that the best way to respond to Milo Yiannopoulos, the self-consciously provocative right-wing figure who just lost his speaking slot at the country’s most prominent conservative conference because he once suggested it’s acceptable for adult men to have sex with 13-year-olds, is to ignore him. The various white-nationalist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, and transphobic rhetoric that Yiannopoulos emits is transparently crafted to “get attention” and provoke backlash, the thinking goes—so why give him the satisfaction?

One answer to that is that unlike truly fringe figures like David Duke, Yiannopoulos does have a constituency—his Facebook page has 2 million followers—and his supporters include the president of the U.S. and some of the president’s top advisers.

To wit:

With all these fans at the top levels of government, it seems like this Milo guy might just land on his feet!

Incidentally, some of the other users from whom Trump took questions during the Reddit AMA had previously used the The_Donald forum to refer to a high-profile victim of an alleged sexual assault as a “little whore,” to refer to multiracial Daily Show host Trevor Noah as “filth from South Africa,” and to refer to Black Lives Matter marches as “chimp outs.” Again—these are the people Trump made time to take questions from during an exclusive campaign Q&A event.

We dumped about 2,000 tons of sewage in the White House on Jan. 20, and it’s going to take a long time to clean it all out.