Alone, where he belongs
His stiffly scripted Monday statement all but forgotten, his indefensible Tuesday off-the-cuff remarks expressing sympathy for white supremacists still echoing, President Trump’s erstwhile allies are leaving him increasingly isolated. Good on the CEOs whose resignations from Trump’s Manufacturing Council and Strategy & Policy Forum forced the President to rush to pretend, like an adolescent insisting he didn’t study for a test he failed, that he was proactively disbanding the panels himself.
Now it is up to Trump’s political partners in Congress and staff in his own administration to break as starkly with a man who has chosen to activate a small slice of his hateful base rather than unite a fractious country.
If, that is, those members of Congress or staffers have the moral courage to put the good of the nation before perceived partisan advantage.
Trump, of course, is convinced he has done nothing wrong — and should get points for having, in 2017, perfunctorily condemned Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other assorted slugs two full days after all hell, including a terrorist atrocity, broke loose at a hate-fest in Charlottesville.
So he grows enraged that Americans, including members of the dreaded mainstream media, focus on his mind-boggling Tuesday declaration that “there is blame on both sides,” and that some of those who vilely gathered were “very fine people.”
He is losing the argument because the Charlottesville rally — which Trump portrayed as a rally in large part of people “there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue” — was, plainly, a collection of racists asserting what they believe is their right to reclaim what they believe is their country. They chanted “Jews will not replace us.” They waved Nazi — real live Nazi! — and Confederate flags, embracing sworn enemies of the United States and its values.
They carried assault rifles, the better to intimidate law enforcement and counterprotesters.
One among them plowed into a crowd, in a terrorist attack that killed Heather Heyer.
Wednesday, in an achingly poignant eulogy, Heyer’s mother urged the nation to “Find what’s wrong, don’t ignore it, don’t look the other way. Say to yourself, ‘What can I do to make a difference?’ And that’s how you’re going to make my child’s death worthwhile.”
Too bitter to attend that funeral, much less speak at it, too angry even to call the mayor of Charlottesville since the attack, the man who commands America’s bully pulpit has instead given large numbers of the haters a moral free pass.
Introspection is, to him, as welcome as an undocumented immigrant. But introspection, if at all possible, is what the moment demands, should the nation have any chance to heal.
Alas, even the prospect of CEOs turning their backs on Trump in droves is unlikely to trigger in him an eruption of conscience. Donald Trump, in the fateful final analysis, is Donald Trump.