Doubling down on hate

Well, so much for the Donald Trump who denounced bigotry and hatred on Monday — in what some said looked like a White House hostage video.

Yesterday the real Donald Trump was back — placing blame equally not on the neoNazis and white supremacists who arrived in Charlottesville with hatred and mayhem on their minds, but on the demonstrators.

“I think there’s blame on both sides,” he said. “And I have no doubt about it.”

So he first explained that he blamed “many sides” on Saturday because he was “waiting for the facts.” Then came the Monday effort clearly aimed at putting the firestorm behind him.

But yesterday he reverted to his own set of facts — “facts” that downplayed the death of one young woman and the injuries to others at the hands of a domestic terrorist.

“Okay, what about the alt-left that came charging at...as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?” Trump asked at a news conference ostensibly to discuss infrastructure.

“But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” he said. “Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.”

He even referenced the Friday evening protest — yes, the one led by neo-Nazis with torches — as being just a simple protest about the statue, and then attempted to shift the discussion to one about all statues.

It was one thing to watch candidate Trump rail against political correctness. It is quite another to watch the president of the United States use that bully pulpit to draw some kind of moral equivalence between those who spew the most vile kind of hatred and those who came to protest that brand of hatred.

Yesterday Trump so abused the moral authority that attaches to his office that he endangers whatever remains of his agenda — along with the future of the party that put him into office.