I've been around for a few decades, growing up in the Reagan years, high school in the Poppy Bush Desert Storm era, and college and entering the workforce during the Clinton years and the dot com bust and I've never been under the illusion that presidents could fix everything. Dubya showed me they have limitations, and that the best outcome is somebody who truly cared like Obama, that's as good as we're going to get.
But I've never been party to a person in the Oval Office who I considered a sworn enemy. Dubya was a jackass and I started this blog to help make sure he wasn't succeeded by a Republican, and I went through Obama's highs and lows, but I never felt that the person in the White House was irredeemable garbage.
Then Trump came along and kept proving me wrong on a daily basis, and today is the day I became despondent about the future of my country, this planet and myself.
The man in the Oval Office is an unapologetic white supremacist-enabling bigot narcissist of the worst order.
President Trump buoyed the white nationalist movement on Tuesday as no president has done in generations — equating activists protesting racism with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend.
Never has he gone as far in defending their actions as he did during a wild, street-corner shouting match of a news conference in the gilded lobby of Trump Tower, angrily asserting that so-called alt-left activists were just as responsible for the bloody confrontation as marchers brandishing swastikas, Confederate battle flags, anti-Semitic banners and “Trump/Pence” signs.
“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth,” David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, wrote in a Twitter post shortly after Mr. Trump spoke.
Richard B. Spencer, a white nationalist leader who participated in the weekend’s demonstrations and vowed to flood Charlottesville with similar protests in the coming weeks, was equally encouraged. “Trump’s statement was fair and down to earth,” Mr. Spencer tweeted.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, a Democrat, wasted little time in accusing the president of adding to the divisions that put an unwanted spotlight on the normally peaceful college town.
“Neo-Nazis, Klansmen and white supremacists came to Charlottesville heavily armed, spewing hatred and looking for a fight,” Mr. McAuliffe said. “One of them murdered a young woman in an act of domestic terrorism, and two of our finest officers were killed in a tragic accident while serving to protect this community. This was not ‘both sides.’”
No word in the Trump lexicon is as tread-worn as “unprecedented.” But members of the president’s staff, stunned and disheartened, said they never expected to hear such a voluble articulation of opinions that the president had long expressed in private. The National Economic Council chairman, Gary D. Cohn, and the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, who are Jewish, stood by uncomfortably as the president exacerbated a controversy that has once again engulfed a White House in disarray.
“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis,” Mr. Trump told reporters, who interrupted him repeatedly when he seemed to equate the actions of protesters on each side.
He spoke of “very fine people on both sides.” And of the demonstrators who rallied on Friday night, some chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans, he said, “You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest.”
This is a man who openly defends neo-Nazis in the most insidious manner, by equating them to those who oppose them. It's a tactic long-used by these scumbags, one as old as America itself, an equivocation that empowers hate by normalizing it.
And now we have somebody in the White House doing it openly and brazenly, with no regard for anyone but himself.
We have seen the face of evil. I thought Bush Senior was a bad man who occasionally did good things, I thought his son was led astray but that he never truly hated the country, he just looked the other way too often and let the David Dukes and Richard Spencers of the world in the door.
Trump put them in his goddamn White House staff. He is an evil man, and anyone who thought that somehow Clinton would be worse needs to have a good, long talk with the shreds of their own conscience and with the ghosts of their tattered credibility.
Donald Trump is an evil man. Full stop. If you wondered how the people of Germany became lost to the Third Reich following World War I, you are living it right now as an American.
No comments:
Post a Comment