Trump’s resounding silence
On Monday, at long last, President Trump named “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists” and other tiki-torch-brandishing dead-enders whose Robert E. Lee rally escalated to murder in Charlottesville, Va. “As I said on Saturday,” he declared, “we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” The trouble is that Trump said no such thing on Saturday.
What Trump condemned Saturday was “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides — on many sides,” which is another way of condemning no side. That it took him two days to correct this allowed German Chancellor Angela Merkel, among others, to beat him to it. So the head of the country that invented Nazism was quicker to condemn it than the president of the country that finally defeated it.
In fact, by the time Trump officially rebuked Nazis, Klansmen and company, it had already been done more effectively by everyone from Fox News to Ted Cruz. The White House’s own ragtag communications team clearly recognized the problem, having tried on Sunday to reverse-engineer an appropriate response from the president’s actual, inappropriate one: “The president said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry and hatred, and of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazi and all extremist groups.”
“Of course”? The president’s alleged clarity was belied by his confederates’ rush to revise and extend his remarks. “Of course it was terrorism,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster said of the killing of a counterprotester on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. As for his boss’ condemnation of white supremacists, he said, “I know it’s clear in his mind.”
The president’s beloved daughter Ivanka, a convert to Judaism, nevertheless saw fit to make it clearer, tweeting on Sunday: “There should be no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.” So did Vice President Mike Pence, who defended Trump and attacked the media but still managed to condemn racist violence in more explicit and unequivocal terms than the president. Even Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is named after two heroes of the Southern secession and not known for his civil rights advocacy, was able to muster a clearer rejection of the extremists than Trump did until Monday.
Americans rely on our presidents, the only officials elected by the nation at large — or, in Trump’s case, a constitutional facsimile thereof — to censure racism, extremism, violence and other wrongs, even if such wrongs go without saying for most of us, to reinforce their rejection by the society as a whole. Trump’s begrudging, belated condemnation of the Charlottesville violence had all the moral force of an insincere apology pried from a petulant child. What was powerful, unmistakable and disturbing was his original omission.