Commander-in-chief of America’s bigots
THE SPECTATOR’S VIEW
To the fires of hatred and racism ignited in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend, Donald Trump delivered a tanker filled with gasoline. The conflagration still burns. To an America pained by the open wounds of its own unresolved fears and inequalities, the president swung a butcher’s knife sharpened on the whetstone of his own ignorance. The patient still bleeds. Trump had a chance and challenge to say what needed to be said after hate groups rampaged through that southern college town on Saturday and a man with ties to the extreme right drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, leaving one woman dead.
History will judge Trump’s response as an abject failure.
The inability of the world’s most powerful man to properly censure an evil fraternity of neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and white-power thugs along with his stubborn insistence they are no different than the people opposing them represents the low point of his presidency. It also signals an emergency for the United States. Beyond any job description set down in law and beyond all the trappings of power meant to inspire national pride in America’s leader, the president of the United States is supposed to be an ethical commanderin-chief who directs that nation ever upward toward its shining goals of freedom and equality for all.
Trump is dragging it down into a dark cellar of intolerance where the bogeymen waving swastika flags are all too real.
First, he was inexcusably late in responding to the violence. Then, his initial reaction was to blame both sides and suggest a moral equivalency between the torch-bearing mob screaming Nazi slogans such as “blood and soil” and those quite rightly insisting this unvarnished hatred has no place in their America.
When Trump finally did condemn the hate groups on Monday, he recited a feeble, pre-written statement that seemed as half-hearted as the apology of a schoolboy caught tossing a rock through a window.
And then on Tuesday, with his trademark unpredictability, Trump undid anything good from that tepid denunciation by again asserting both sides were to blame for what happened in Charlottesville.
Emboldened by what they see as the president’s sympathy, the storm troopers of the extreme right have come out of their caves and threatened more rallies in defence of the vitriol they call “free speech.”
Meanwhile, a country divided over its past and anxious for its future waits in vain for a president who can reconcile, heal and lead a truly united United States.
If there’s anything positive in the aftermath of Charlottesville, it has come from clear-eyed politicians — in Trump’s Republican Party as well as Democrats — who have called out the hate-mongers.
It has come from the powerful chief executives who resigned from the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum in protest of his actions.
And it is coming from all the ordinary Americans who see that the clothes have fallen from this American emperor to reveal as never before something naked and truly hideous.