Digging in
The combative president hurts his own cause
Improving the nation’s infrastructure is the part of President Donald Trump’s agenda that has the best chance of uniting Americans across the board. Mr. Trump held a Tuesday press conference to celebrate his executive order “to dramatically reform the nation’s badly broken infrastructure permitting process,” with key Cabinet members lined up alongside him to show resolve. It’s too bad that the Trump Tower event will be remembered for Mr. Trump digging himself into a hole. In revisiting the weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Va., he recanted the previous day’s measured statement that had turned down the heat.
To review: the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12 was a legal gathering of hundreds of people from across the country expressing the most odious and unAmerican views that can be imagined — their declarations of white supremacy, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism just scratch the surface. The organizing principle was to protest the planned removal of a public statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, part of the continuing debate over Confederate symbols in the South. Hundreds of people turned out to denounce the white nationalists. Some of them engaged in physical confrontations. A 32-yearold woman died and 19 were injured when a man plowed his car into a group of protesters; the driver had marched in the Unite the Right rally.
After Mr. Trump spoke Saturday afternoon about the overall events, he was justifiably criticized for being vague by condemning the “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides — on many sides.” When the subject arises, it’s not asking too much for the president of the United States to denounce neo-Nazi white nationalists by name and with force. His Monday statement, read from a prepared text, named names and touched all the salient points.
But on Tuesday, when he got in front of an open mic with a lobby full of reporters asking why he took so long to denounce neo-Nazis, the president proceeded to shoot his mouth off. He reverted to drawing a moral equivalency between the white supremacists and the counterprotesters. There is no reason to suggest that there were “very fine people” among the Unite the Right marchers. There is no immediate danger to statues of George Washington, the father of our country who happened to own slaves back in the day, if a monument to a Confederate general is removed by a city in a public process. Genuine concern can be expressed over the tactics of the “antifa” movement, and there are decent people in the South who want their complex history to be appreciated in full. The combative president hurts himself by being unable to engage in a reasonable argument.
The outrage over Mr. Trump’s Tuesday remarks may be overtaken in the next news cycle, but the damage has been real. Among the most tangible reactions, the two advisory councils of top business leaders have collapsed, after executives began to defect one by one in protest. The businessman president who campaigned on making America’s economic health his No. 1 priority has squandered another opportunity to leverage the goodwill of the very people who could help that cause. The political outsider elected to shake things up in Washington needs to start repairing his own infrastructure.