White Supremacists Kill Counterprotester in VA; Trump Blames “Many Sides”
Note: This story originally appeared on my blog on August 13, 2017.
A thirty-two-year-old woman, recently identified as Heather Heyer, has been confirmed dead and nineteen others were injured after someone drove a car through a crowd of counterprotesters at a Charlottesville, Virginia white nationalist rally yesterday afternoon. The twenty-one-year-old driver has been charged with one count of second degree murdrr and a host of other related crimes. Governor Terry McAuliffe has declared a state of emergency and has demanded that the white supremacists leave the state.
Donald Trump, as well as his wife, Melania, both sent out tweets condemning the attack.
Then Trump used a previously planned press conference to address the situation. “In the strongest possible words” Trump denounced the “egregious” acts of violence that occurred in Charlottesville on “many sides.”
Trump then took pains to state that racism and racist violence didn’t start with his administration before seguing into self-congratulatory talk about the low unemployment rate, the supposed return of outsourcing companies to the US, and legislation that improved the Veteran’s Administration.
Needless to say, Trump’s statements outraged civil rights advocates and Trump critics, who, to a man, called Trump out for his refusal to use the words “white nationalism” or “domestic terrorism” in his statement.
While I agree that Trump needs to “call a spade a spade,” I have to wonder why anyone is surprised that Trump sidestepped this particular issue and turned the conversation back around to himself. His malignant narcissism — the jaw-dropping lack of empathy, the grandiosity, and the excessively strong need for attention — is well-documented. If anybody could turn a moment of national mourning into an advertisement for the (very) few accomplishments of a treasonous administration, it would be Donald John Trump.
And why did anyone expect Trump to denounce white nationalists anyway? Trump spent nearly a year and a half on the campaign trail pandering to that very demographic.
Trump kicked off his presidential campaign by claiming that Mexicans who illegally cross the border into the United States are rapists and drug runners. Then Trump, expressing concern over “radical Islamic terrorism”, proposed a ban on all non-citizen Muslims, many of whom are not white. Later in the campaign, Trump suggested that a judge overseeing the Trump University fraud lawsuit was not impartial due to his Mexican ancestry.
He knowingly retweeted wildly inaccurate crime statistics from white nationalist groups. Trump took his time dissociating himself from David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, after Duke endorsed his run for the White House. He temporarily hired Steve Bannon to manage his campaign despite Bannon’s ties to the white nationalist and alt-right movements and then gave him the job of Chief Strategist. Trump also tapped Alabama senator Jeff Sessions for the job of Attorney General despite the fact that none other than Coretta Scott King denounced Sessions as a racist.
Trump characterized predominantly black urban neighborhoods as poverty-stricken crime-ridden wastelands, confidently stating that stop-and-frisk was the reason for New York City’s historically low crime rate, despite all evidence to the contrary. And only recently, Trump urged police officers to treat criminal suspects roughly during arrests at a time when outcry against police brutality directed at people of color has reached a fever pitch.
In fact, Donald Trump has positioned himself as an anti-Obama of sorts all along. He was never interested in racial conciliation. Promising to “Make America Great Again”, Donald Trump chucked the dog whistles of late 20th century Republicans and ran on an explicitly white male supremacist platform. And riding the crest of the backlash against progressive gains made by women of all races, men of color, the LGBTQ community, and religious minorities, Donald Trump won the white male vote by a substantial margin on Election Day.
And all this was after he was twice sued by blacks for housing discrimination, after he led the villification campaign against the falsely accused Central Park Five, after he made racist remarks about the black accountants who worked in his casinos, after he rose to a leadership position within the birther movement.
So expecting Donald Trump, to renounce racism and the violence of white nationalist agitators, some of the few die-hard believers he has left, is an exercise in futility.
And, while Trump may not have started the fire of American racism, he dumped gallons of gasoline onto the smoldering embers during his presidential run, then roasted marshmallows over the rising flames when he ascended to the White House. Trump and his flunkies will never admit it but Trump is just as responsible for yesterday’s bloodshed as the driver of that car.
