TRUMP TALKS AT LAST. WILL HE ACT?
There’s a moral awakening taking place across the United States, but President Donald Trump is still hiding under his blanket.
The racists’ march in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday, a protest against the planned removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, presented Trump with the most glaring opportunity yet to separate himself decisively from the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have cheered him on since he announced his candidacy and to make clear that the United States has no room for what they stand for. He blew it. After the marchers turned to violence, and one of them plowed a car into a group of counterprotesters, injuring at least 19 and killing a woman named Heather Heyer, Trump said only that he rejected violence “on many sides.”
On Monday, Trump found his way to something resembling a presidential response. “Racism is evil,” he said in a terse speech delivered off a Teleprompter in a tight-jawed monotone. “Those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
His aides reportedly urged him to express that straightforward sentiment Saturday. Yet even as he now managed to get some of the right words out he could not bring himself to assign blame for Heyer’s death, saying only that she “was tragically killed.” Contrast that with his eager invocations of Kathryn Steinle — “the beautiful Kate,” as he started calling her in tweets and speeches more than two years ago, after she “was gunned down in SF by an illegal immigrant.”
The double standard goes to the heart of Trump’s simplistic, racialized worldview, where the criminals are black or brown and the victims are white. In fact, white supremacists have been responsible for 49 homicides in the past 16 years, more than any other domestic extremist movement, according to a joint intelligence bulletin produced by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in May.
The good news for Trump is that he has the chance now to demonstrate that he is truly concerned about this continuing threat. He could start by scrapping his plan to remove white supremacists from a federal anti-terror program’s agenda. (On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions called Saturday’s attack an act of domestic terrorism, but Trump declined to use the term.)
He could speak out even more forcefully and frequently against white supremacists, who have planned at least nine marches around the country for this weekend.
He could support the removal of symbols of the Confederacy — starting with the statue of Jefferson Davis that still stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
If nothing else, the white-supremacist marches remind us not just how many of these monuments remain in our midst, but also of the essence of what they represent — racism and treason. Trump can look to the examples of New Orleans, Richmond, Va., and Charleston, S.C., where activists and courageous public officials have worked together to end the glorification of some of the great villains in U.S. history.
The president could take a cue from Mitch Landrieu, the New Orleans mayor who gave a remarkable speech after the city dismantled the last of its Confederate monuments in May. “The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity,” he said. “It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered.”
In fact, Trump doesn’t even need to look beyond his own Cabinet for a lesson in moral growth. After a white supremacist massacred nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, Nikki Haley — then the state’s governor, and now Trump’s U.N. ambassador — recognized the cruel symbolism of the Confederate flag flying at the Statehouse and agreed to pull it down. “It should have never been there,” she said.