What Trump’s first response to the Charlottesville carnage says about his moral compass
From the The Bee
AUGUST 13, 2017 11:00 AM
President Donald Trump’s moral compass isn’t
working. The needle’s spinning wildly, but the leader of the free world just
can’t find moral north.
The latest example of his moral senility came
in the wake of the white nationalist and Nazi atrocities in Charlottesville
this weekend. On Friday night, torch-wielding supremacists descended on the
college town, chanting slogans such as “Jews will not replace us,” many of them
giving the Nazi salute.
The event looked like a hybrid of a KKK lynch
mob and a Nazi book-burning ceremony. The tweeter-in-chief’s response was …
silence. The next morning, hundreds of heavily armed white supremacists
descended on the town again. From the loud-mouth president … more silence.
By 11 a.m., media outlets were beaming footage
of American Carnage around the world: Nazi mobs attacking the broad array of
anti-Nazis who had gathered in Charlottesville to defend what is best in the
human experience: diversity, tolerance, the embrace of difference, the ability
to love across ethnic and racial and religious divides.
SIGN UP
Hour after hour, the rolling coverage
continued: And, from the president, the vice president, and Attorney General
Jeff Sessions … silence.
Finally, after a car, likely driven by a
far-right thug, mowed down protestors, Trump awkwardly read a prepared
statement. Expressing hurt that protestors were ignoring his supposed economic
accomplishments, he blamed the “hatred” coming from “many sides.”
At a moment of extraordinary civic peril, with
the fabric of the peaceful, democratic, society under assault from a ragtag
band of fascists, Trump’s speech was beyond shameful.
Equating the “hatred” expressed by die-hard
Nazis – yes, the sort of pond-scum who tattoo swastikas onto their chests and
go around taunting Jews, blacks, gays and other minorities that they will hunt
them down and kill them – with the opposition to that world view expressed by
the Virginians who came out onto the streets of Charlottesville to protest the
Nazis’ presence should in and of itself disqualify Trump from holding public
office.
Trump’s inane words are, alas, no surprise. As
the KKK’s one-time Grand Wizard David Duke so helpfully pointed out on
Saturday, Trump was elected by appealing to white animus against the
multi-racial, multi-cultural society.
A large part of his most ardent fan-base has
always been enthused by his willingness to at least partially embrace “white
nationalism.”
That’s why Trump found it almost impossible to
properly distance himself from Duke after the KKK’er endorsed his candidacy in
2016. It’s why he routinely slams Black Lives Matter while supporting groups
who push the White Lives Matter slogan.
It’s why, surreally, he managed to make a
speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day that didn’t mention anti-Semitism or
reference the fact that millions of Jews were gassed.
When challenged, his office said something to
the effect of “All Lives Matter,” and “lots of different people were killed in
the war,” and then explained that the cataclysm of the Holocaust was “sad.”
In Trump’s vision of the world, certain peoples
are inherently more valuable than others, and highlighting the harms done to,
and the moral claims of, those deemed less valuable doesn’t fit into such a
calculus.
Moral equivalence arguments aren’t just
inadequate to the events of the moment. They are deeply destructive of our
ability as a society to parse right from wrong.
Update
On Monday, August 14, 2017, President Trump
made an additional statement deploring the violence specifically of Nazis, KKK,
and similar extremists.
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