It’s good vs. evil & Prez won’t take sides

Remember how all this started. It started on Friday night at the University of Virginia, white men with torches marching toward a statue of Thomas Jefferson, who founded that school. This is what they chanted: “You will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” “Blood and soil!” “Whose streets? Our streets!”

Now, in New York City on Tuesday afternoon, the President of the United States stands at a news conference and says that there is blame for what happened across the rest of a tragic and shameful weekend “on both sides.” Only if he sees himself as the President of white America.

Even Sen. Marco Rubio, never confused with a profile in courage where Donald Trump is concerned, said this on Tuesday on social media after the closest a presidential press conference has ever come to a bar fight:

“Mr. President, you can’t allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of the blame.”

But that is what Trump did. That is exactly what he did, not just in front of his country, but in front of the world, across which other world leaders now feel this country’s moral authority could fit into a shot glass. After reluctantly sounding on Monday like the prosecutor of neo-Nazis and the rest of the guttersnipes who converged on Charlottesville, Trump reverted back to being a defense attorney on Tuesday.

“Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” he said. “This week, it is Robert E. Lee and this week, Stonewall Jackson. Is it George Washington next?” This wasn’t just Trump making a weird connection between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. This was the Trump of the campaign that got him elected President, the Trump who said from the start that if you hit him, he would come at you 10 times harder. So he got hit over the weekend, from everywhere, for saying that there was blame on “many sides” for the weekend in which a white supremacist, a part of neo-Nazi demonstrations in 2017 that reminded you of American Nazi rallies in New York in the late 1930s, killed a young woman