OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: Played to his base

Some things are worse than others.

Neo-Nazis espousing racial and ethnic hatred, for example, are worse than people who take to the street to respond that black lives matter and Jewish people have equal rights.

Got that, Mr. President?

Donald Trump didn't get it Saturday. Only nearly 48 hours later, under duress, apparently persuaded by his family and aides and Republican congressional colleagues that he needed to rise above himself, did he grudgingly call out and condemn white supremacists.

He aimed better late than never--barely--to do what a less disgraceful president would have done in the first place, which was seek to soothe and lift a troubled nation.

His attempt to repair his own damage of horrid equivocation on white nationalism, while welcome, was so tactically essential that it can't begin to excuse his disgraceful instincts and the message they left for nearly two dreadful days, and probably still.

This human disgrace who now defiles the once-great American presidency, Donald Trump, would have had us believe that declaring that black lives matter--and confronting the hate that says otherwise--was the same level of inhumanity as declaring that black lives don't.

Unspeakably ugly warfare broke out Saturday in Charlottesville, Va. On one side were avowed white supremacists and white nationalists making Nazi salutes, waving Confederate flags, bearing heavy arms, making anti-Semitic slurs and, in some cases, wearing Trump campaign caps.

On the other side were counter-protesters including members of the movement called Black Lives Matter.

In response that afternoon, an egomaniacal narcissist looked upon race warfare in a great American town a few miles south and saw only his own reflection and interest.

The hideous creature who is now the nation's preposterous second-place president rose to denounce such hatred ... "on many sides, on many sides."

He often repeats his inaner comments as if to make them less inane by saying them twice.

An American president was saying a little neo-Nazism in America is suitable for immorally equivalent lumping with hating neo-Nazism.

A few congressional Republicans, possessed of decency and unpossessed of any severe megalomaniacal and narcissistic disorder, reacted as evolved human beings living in post-World War II civilization.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said on Twitter: "Very important for the nation to hear [the president] describe events in Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by white supremacists."

U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah put on Twitter: "We should call evil by its name. My brother didn't give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home."

The best statement among Republican senators came from our own Tom Cotton, who called white supremacists what they are and wrote: "These contemptible little men do not speak for what is just, noble and best about America. They ought to face what they would deny their fellow citizens: the full extent of the law."

I'd amend the manliness-obsessed Cotton's statement only to stipulate that neo-Nazism would be contemptible in American traitors of any gender or shape or size.

Trump was concerned mostly about the fact that people were saying his incendiary rhetoric had emboldened American Nazis to emerge from the shadows to infest our culture in this way. And it had.

David Duke, the Klansman from Louisiana, said it plainly. He said those white-supremacist demonstrators in Charlottesville, of which he was one, were trying to "fulfill the promises of Donald Trump."

So, naturally, Trump tried to deflect on Saturday by making a reference to Barack Obama. His seeming point was to contend that he is to blame for nothing and that some would say Black Lives Matter members were emboldened by Obama.

Obama condemned the laxity of gun laws after first-graders were executed. He expressed the truth that American police have killed an overwhelmingly disproportionate number of black people, and pronounced that not good. But he never failed to seek to soothe in time of grief and crisis.

Trump, instead, engaged initially in cynical political mathematics.

He is down to his base, about 35 percent. That base includes the disgraces shouting Nazi slogans in Charlottesville. His re-election chances will be built on that base.

He must hold desperately to that base to have any chance for two other things to happen--for moderate Republicans to come home to him because the economy is doing well enough, and for Democrats to oblige him again, as they well may, with an unappealing opponent offering no strong message or connection to white working people.

That kind of political calculus hamstrings Trump. It gives us an American president most of us hadn't remotely expected, meaning one allied with a Russian dictator and instinctively defensive about Nazis.

I've not mentioned the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville. That was but a convenient excuse for anti-American human atrocities emboldened by the preposterous second-place president to party like it was 1934 in Germany.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 08/15/2017

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