Donald Trump’s response to Charlottesville has been so appalling, he has begun to drive even some of his core supporters away. In The New York Times, former Trump supporter Julius Krein explains his change of heart:
For months, despite increasing chaos and incoherence, I have given Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt: “No, I don’t really think he is a racist,” I have told skeptical audiences. “Yes, he says some stupid things, but none of it really matters; he’s not really that incompetent.” Or: “They’ve made some mistakes, but it’s still early.”
It’s no longer early. Not only has the president failed to make the course corrections necessary to save his administration, but his increasingly appalling conduct will continue to repel anyone who might once have been inclined to work with him.
John Cassidy at The New Yorker writes about Trump’s weak presidency:
Of course, it would be wishful thinking to suggest that the Republican Party establishment is preparing to make a decisive break with Trump. While McConnell and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, have both put out statements saying that racism and white supremacism have no place in the G.O.P., neither of them has explicitly criticized Trump. Even now, most Republicans are too intent on pursuing their regressive policy agenda, and too frightened of incurring the wrath of the Trump-supporting hordes going into the 2018 midterms, to do what almost all of them must know, deep down, is the right thing.
But, even assuming that Trump will survive this latest horror show, as he has survived many previous ones, his Presidency will be further diminished and tarnished. Outside the arena of national security, the Presidency is a weak office; to get anything substantial done, the person in the Oval Office has to put together coalitions, bringing along powerful people and interest groups. As the health-care fiasco demonstrated, Trump wasn’t very good at that stuff to begin with—forgive the understatement—and he has just greatly compounded his difficulties. By dint of his pigheadedness, or prejudice, or both, he has moved onto political ground that makes it virtually impossible for other people in influential positions, such as C.E.O.s, or the heads of other organizations, or senior government officials, or celebrities, or even his own Cabinet members, to stand with him, or even to be seen to coöperate with him. That is what happens when a President throws away his own legitimacy.
Over at BuzzFeed, Ben Smith pens a fascinating piece on Steve Bannon and Trump:
Bannon has a bizarre dual role as Trump’s ideologist: He’s the guy selling a new cross-racial coalition; and he’s the chief arsonist of that coalition, using racism as a kind of cultural token for anti-elite politics. The congressional coalition he imagines, in which Democrats cross the aisle to join Trump under the red flag of socialism, is now laughable. Trump has lost Ryan and McConnell without gaining Schumer and Pelosi. And the notion, after Charlottesville, of a cross-racial coalition requires imagining a president so deeply and dexterously committed to reconciliation that you are imagining a different human being.
Matt Taibi at Rolling Stone also analyzes Bannon as well:
Bannon's dismissal of the Charlottesville Nazis as "losers" who need to be suppressed – "We gotta help crush" them, he actually told Kuttner – seems insincere to say the least.
But remember: the snooty, college-based wing of the racialist right Bannon leads has always thought of itself as a cut above the mean – the thinking man's Nazi movement, if you will. And its leaders have always looked upon goose-steppers like the Charlottesville goons as political liabilities.
Frank Rich:
I guess we now have to officially retire “most shocking” and “most damaging” as modifiers for anything Donald Trump does, because he will always find a way to up the ante. My own theory remains that this administration’s downfall began with the firing of James Comey, an unabashed attempt to obstruct justice in the Russia investigation. (Remember when that seemed shocking?) His downfall will culminate only when the GOP, in existential extremis, realizes that its choices are to leap from the Titanic or go down with the ship. As far as Republicans are concerned, the iceberg is not yet fully in view. Yes, the confirmation that an American president is a racist bully whose empathy is mainly reserved for either neo-Nazis or neo-Stalinists has prompted an uptick in public expressions of outrage by some GOP politicians, but words are toothless. These few rhetorical defections are not enough of a revolt to get us to the endgame — the endgame not being impeachment (never going to happen) but Trump’s implosion. No one is shrewder about Trump than his Art of the Deal co-author Tony Schwartz, and his summation after the Charlottesville events rings true to me: “The circle is closing at blinding speed. Trump is going to declare victory before Mueller and Congress leave him no choice.”
Conservative Michael Gerson:
[M]oral equivalence is an option — for those who are willfully blind to history and have a shriveled emptiness where their soul once resided.
This is now, sadly, an accurate description of the United States’ 45th president, who felt compelled to reveal his true convictions. Such compulsion has the virtue of honesty. It has the drawback (from Trump’s perspective) of leaving his defenders without excuse.
Now the operative question is not “Should Bannon leave?” It has become: “Why should anyone not named Bannon stay at the White House?”
On a final note, Eugene Robinson calls out the Republicans who stick by Trump:
History will remember who spoke out, who was complicit and who stood idly by. [...]
The chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and National Guard also publicly condemned hate groups in the wake of Charlottesville. They, of course, could not mention the commander in chief by name.
But politicians can. And they must.