The live, on-air, in-your-face suicide death of the Trump presidency
Will there ever be a more more shameful day than yesterday in the history of the U.S. presidency?
On the day that three innocents lost their lives to alt-right infamy, the stinking abomination of Trump equated seig-heiling white supremacists, Ku Klux Klanners, neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates with those protesting against them. The "hatred, bigotry and violence" the nation witnessed on the streets of Charlottesville were, in Trump's diseased brain, not an "egregious display" from one side, but from "many sides."
And, as the president saw it, there was nothing particularly unusual or remarkably appalling about yesterday's violence. He had to interrupt his vacation golfing for this? — this that has "been going on for a long time in our country," as he put it. "It's not Donald Trump, it's not Barack Obama," he mused; it was just another day in which the president of the United States was a mere bystander in the seething alt-right resentments he has for so long encouraged.
But back to, and about, my introductory question — Will there ever be a more shameful day in the history of the U.S. presidency?
Of course there will be. Because the president of the United States is an inexhaustibly shameless vulgarian who has never met a political obscenity he didn't like.
Indeed, only the transcendent disgrace of Trump could make his erstwhile competitors in the party of "Southern strategies" look virtuous. Ted Cruz "urge[d]the Department of Justice to immediately investigate and prosecute today's grotesque act of domestic terrorism," and Marco Rubio tweeted that it was critical for "@potus [to] describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists." Little Marco may not be a sociologist, man, but he knows domestic terrorism when he sees it. And even Lyin' Ted can get something honestly right now and then.
As for others rightly appalled as much by Trump as by yesterday's violence, the president's flat, perfunctory delivery was especially salient. "Trump and his people did not believe the moment worthy of rhetorical craft, worthy of serious thought," wrote Bush II speechwriter Michael Gerson. "The president is confident that his lazy musings are equal to history. They are not. They are babble in the face of tragedy."
The zenith of Trumpian babble yesterday? The hapless vulgarian said his administration wants to "to study [the Charlottesville 'situation']" — which was the characteristic Trumpian ploy of evading any conspicuous responsibility. Added this dreadful horror of the smallest of men: "and we want to see what we're doing wrong as a country."
That, it nearly goes without saying, is too easy; it requires no study. What we're doing wrong we did last November. But, Mr. Trump, we do appreciate your helping to remind us yesterday just how colossally wrong we were.
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