In a series of staffing decisions announced Sunday, president-elect Donald Trump sought to reassure Republican lawmakers with the appointment of R.N.C. chairman Reince Priebus as his chief of staff, even as he named Stephen Bannon, the former chief executive of Breitbart News, as his chief strategist and senior counselor, elevating an infamous trafficker of racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric to one of the most powerful positions in the White House.

Bannon, who The New York Times reports will answer directly to Trump, not to Priebus, left Breitbart to become Trump’s campaign C.E.O. in August, after spending years turning the conservative news site into a haven for anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny, as well as virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Headlines published under Bannon’s purview include, “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” “Young Muslims In the West Are a Ticking Time Bomb,” and “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?” And entire category of stories on Breitbart is categorized simply “Black Crime.”

Bannon himself has also been accused of bigoted rhetoric in his personal life. His ex-wife, Mary Louise Piccard said in 2007 during divorce hearings that Bannon had choked her, and had refused to let their daughters go to schools with Jewish students, whom he deemed “whiny brats”. (Bannon has denied her claims.) Ben Shapiro, a former editor-at-large at Breitbart, described him as a “vindictive, nasty figure, infamous for verbally abusing supposed friends and threatening enemies.”

Civil rights groups and hate speech watchdogs reacted with outrage to Bannon’s appointment atop the White House hierarchy. The Southern Poverty Law Center called Breitbart under Bannon’s leadership a “white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill,” and sent out several tweets reminding readers that Breitbart.com had mandated stories about “immigration, ISIS, race riots, and what we call ‘the collapse of traditional values,’” and that Bannon himself had written a piece for the site defending the Confederate flag shortly after the Charleston shootings. (“Hoist it high and proud,” read the headline.) Groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Council on American-Islamic Relations denounced Bannon’s hire, worried about his proximity to the president. “We call on President-elect Trump to appoint and nominate Americans committed to the well-being of all our country's people,” A.D.L. chief executive and national director __ Jonathan Greenblatt__ said.

And for whatever ideological conflict exists within the Democratic Party at the moment, their most prominent figures universally denounced Bannon’s appointment. “Those who are accommodating and supporting Trump’s appointment of a white nationalist and anti-Semite to a senior White House post should think long and hard about how they will be remembered in the history books,“ the D.N.C. said in a statement.

The celebratory reaction of white nationalists to Bannon’s ascension only heightened those fears. “I think that anyone that helps complete the program and the policies that President-elect Trump has developed during the campaign is a very good thing, obviously,” former Ku Klux Klan leader __David Duke__told CNN. Brad Griffin, the owner of the white nationalist website Occidental Dissent, said that he knew where Bannon would stand on the totem pole. “Reince [Priebus] can certainly get more done on Capitol Hill. He will be an instrument of Trump's will, not the other way around,” he predicted. ”Bannon is better suited as chief strategist and looking at the big picture.“

For now, however, much of the Republican Party appears to be either defending Bannon or keeping quiet. On Monday morning, Priebus reassured MSNBC that their joint priority was fulfilling Trump’s agenda. “I can assure you and I think it's important and I know President-elect Trump wants everyone to understand this, all Americans out there, no matter your race, your gender, your ethnic background, he wants to make you proud of our country, he wants to serve you,” Priebus promised. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is considered a top candidate to be Trump‘s secretary of state, dismissed the idea that Bannon should be held responsible for anything published on Breitbart. “They now want to come back and say that anything that anybody ever published in Breitbart is Steve Bannon,” he said Monday on Fox and Friends. “That’s baloney,”