Two days after a white supremacist orchestrated a deadly terror attack in Charlottesville, President Trump finally read a prepared statement condemning “K.K.K., neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups”...only to retweet a leader of the alt-right this morning. We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times:
His aides reportedly urged him to express that straightforward sentiment on Saturday. Yet even as he now managed to get some of the right words out he could not bring himself to assign blame for Ms. Heyer’s death, saying only that she “was tragically killed.” Contrast that with his eager invocations of Kathryn Steinle — “the beautiful Kate,” as he started calling her in tweets and speeches more than two years ago, after she “was gunned down in SF by an illegal immigrant.”
The double standard goes to the heart of Mr. Trump’s simplistic, racialized worldview, where the criminals are black or brown and the victims are white. In fact, white supremacists have been responsible for 49 homicides in the past 16 years, more than any other domestic extremist movement, according to a joint intelligence bulletin produced by the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security in May.
Nicole Lewis compiled stark graphics comparing Trump’s response time to various attacks (no surprise, it shows a massive lag time when it’s domestic terrorism).
Meanwhile, Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post takes on racism in the millennial generation:
Racist grandpas may be dying out, but their bigotry is regenerating in today’s youths. [...]
The driver accused of murdering counterprotester Heather Heyer and injuring 19 is a 20-year-old white man.
He would of course not be the first radicalized young white man to commit an act of domestic terrorism. There was the then-21-year-old white male who murdered nine African Americans at a Charleston church in 2015, and the 28-year-old white Baltimore man who in March allegedly rode a bus 200 miles to New York in search of black men to kill at random.
A recent Joint Intelligence Bulletin, obtained by Foreign Policy magazine, details plenty of other attacks perpetrated by young white-supremacist men.
Rosie Gray at The Atlantic dives deep into the branding efforts of the white nationalist movement:
The alt-right movement has sought over the past two years to rebrand white nationalism, lifting it out of the obscure corners of the website Stormfront and elevating it into the mainstream political discussion. [...] The photos from Charlottesville show Confederate flags, Nazi insignia, and militia members with guns. David Duke was there. In the end, the alt-right never shed its association with older fascist and white-supremacist ideas and movements, and arguably never really tried.
Spencer was eager to distance himself from the chaos of Charlottesville when I spoke to him on Saturday night. [...]
Kessler declined to be interviewed on Saturday night, saying he felt it would be “biased.” But he disputed the claim that Nazi symbols had been an important element of the march, saying there had been just one guy with a Nazi flag. (Photos from the march show a swastika armband on a featured speaker, T-shirts quoting Hitler, and other Nazi iconography.)
Paul Waldman at The Week:
One way to interpret Trump's approach to white supremacists is that he cynically panders for their support. Whether you think that's the case, or that he agrees with them deep down, it's clear that Trump has his own version of the "permanent campaign" that pundits began lamenting back when Bill Clinton was president. Trump certainly acts as though the 2016 campaign never ended, and not only with the way he keeps bringing up his 2016 opponent and reminding us of how losing the popular vote was actually the most fantastic victory in the history of American politics. His 2020 campaign committee (yes, there already is one) just released an ad attacking "the president's enemies."
But more than that, Trump's permanent campaign is about whom he sees as his constituency and the people whose opinions and interests he needs to concern himself with. Let's not forget that he got to be president by ignoring those who told him to reach across the aisle and soften the most repugnant parts of his personality and his appeal. Hatred, fear, racial resentment, xenophobia — they all turned out to be effective tools. Even if they could only get him 46 percent of the vote, that was enough.
Tessa Stuart at Rolling Stone details the ties Trump’s advisors have to the alt-right and white supremacist movement:
Trump's circle is filled with people who have espoused racism, who have pushed ethno-nationalist policies and/or who have ties to the same white supremacists Trump at first refused to denounce.
Ben Collins explains how Trump’s actions after his prepared statement suggest he’s not genuinely concerned about healing the nation or calling out the alt-right:
Then, late on Monday night, Trump retweeted Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who spent part of Saturday amplifying an entirely inaccurate conspiracy theory that the attack was actually perpetrated by an “anti-Trump, open borders drug addict.” That innocent man was then identified by name and quickly harassed and threatened on Facebook.
And on a final note, here is Eugene Robinson’s take:
I might take all the GOP breast-beating more seriously if the party would abandon its state-by-state campaign to impose restrictive election laws that disproportionately disenfranchise African American and Hispanic voters. [...] There are those who see Trump’s initial reluctance to denounce white-power groups as nothing but politics — an appeal to white voters who are anxious about growing diversity. Yet the president’s Monday reversal was clearly a political calculation. I believe what we heard Saturday was simply a genuine first reaction. [...]
Trump has called himself the “least racist person on Earth.” There is no end to the man’s lies.