Far-right nationalism has been on the rise in Europe in recent years, and now Donald Trump has brought it to the United States. So perhaps President Obama felt more comfortable talking about it on his trip to Europe, where it’s a thing people already admit is happening, vs. here in the United States, where our media is pretending something else is going on. Wherever he said it, we should heed Obama’s warning.
“I do believe, separate and apart from any particular election or movement, that we are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude sort of nationalism or ethnic identity or tribalism that is built around an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’” Mr. Obama said. [...]
“In the United States, we know what happens when we start dividing ourselves along lines of race or religion or ethnicity. It’s dangerous,” he said. “Not just for the minority groups that are subjected to that kind of discrimination or, in some cases in the past violence, but because we don’t then realize our potential as a country when we’re preventing blacks or Latinos or Asians or gays or women from fully participating in the project of building American life.”
Luckily, we have a media committed to pretending that’s not what’s happening! This was a somewhat more explicit warning than Obama sounded at his press conference Monday before he left for Europe, but there, too, he offered a careful caution:
“I think there will be certain elements of his temperament that will not serve him well unless he recognizes them and corrects them,” Obama added, “because when you’re a candidate and you say something that is inaccurate or controversial, it has less impact than it does when you’re president of the United States. Everybody around the world is paying attention, markets moves. National security issues require a level of precision in order to make sure you don’t make mistakes. I think he recognizes that this is different.”
We’ll see on that last part. But the president is telling us reasons why we should be nervous about Donald Trump. It sure would be nice if the media got over its urge to normalize the situation and listened to what Obama is saying.