Can't disavow the neo-Nazi carnage
Matthew d'Ancona
... Even by his own tawdry standards, Donald Trump’s response to these disturbances has been breathtakingly feeble. His initial tweet was a feast of blandness:“We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Let’s come together as one!” Don’t you just love those exclamation marks?
Later he condemned “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides – on many sides”. The repetition is a Trumpian tic, and often, as in this case, psychologically revealing. Instead of denouncing explicitly the white nationalists responsible for the bloodshed, the president took craven refuge in moral equivalence and evasion. Only last week he threatened a distant dictator with “fire and fury”. Yet, confronted with homegrown bigotry and its violent consequences, he dons the kid gloves of a politician anxious not to upset the militant wing of his base ...
... Discrimination against African Americans in housing rentals; his full-page newspaper ad in 1989 calling for the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers (later exonerated) in the Central Park jogger case; his championing of the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya; his retweeting of messages from white supremacists; his outrageous statements about Mexicans and Muslims on the campaign trail: there is an ugly pattern of behaviour ...
When masked inadequates give the Nazi salute and yell “Heil Trump!”, he dare not disown them. Instead, he disgraces himself and the presidency with a stream of banalities that only emphasise his aversion to stating the truth – a very obvious truth in this case. Against stiff competition, it is the clearest evidence to date that he is unfit for the great office he holds ...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/13/charlottesville-white-supremacists-donald-trump
