That headline might sound a little familiar to you. I have changed a couple of the words. Below is the actual quotation.
We're led by a man who is very, very -- look. We're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he has got something else in mind. And the 'something else in mind,' people can not believe it. They can not believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts, and can't even mention the words: Radical Islamic Terrorism.
There is something going on, it is inconceivable. There is something going on.— Donald Trump, June 13, 2016.
Trump uttered that vile, hateful slander about President Obama—hinting that he was somehow in league with Muslim terrorists or, even worse, ISIS—on, where else, Fox & Friends. He did so the day after Omar Mateen, an American-born Muslim, killed 49 people on “Latin Night” at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. It was far from the only time Trump attacked Obama along these lines.
Never mind that Obama did call the Pulse murders “an act of terror and an act of hate,” and said that he had very good reason not to use phrases such as “radical Islamic terrorism”—namely that experts in both his administration and that of his predecessor had determined that using the phrase would only make us less safe.
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, in a sense, Trump refuses not only to use the accurate phrase “white nationalist terrorism” to describe acts like the mass killing in El Paso—carried out, it certainly appears, by a Trump-supporting, Mexican-hating, anti-immigrant white supremacist—on Saturday, he won’t, as of this writing, even call it terrorism, period.
To be clear, President Charlottesville must use all three of the words: White. Nationalist. Terrorism. And if we are going to hold him to the same standard to which he held President Obama, then we have to ask just why it is he hasn’t used them, and whom he might be in league with. Trump’s own words provide our answer: "There is something going on, it is inconceivable. There is something going on."
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)