U.S. CHARLOTTESVILLE
Bigots Get a Boost from the Bully Pulpit After Charlottesville2
Nearly alone among the nationfs elected
leaders, President Trump saw a nobility of purpose in the fiery procession that
began a weekend of street fights in Charlottesville, Va. White nationalists
hoisted tiki torches that recalled the horrifying
imagery of the Ku Klux Klan. They revived an old Nazi chant–gBlood and
Soilh–which had been silenced in 1945 with American blood on German soil. And
they mixed in a new anti-Semitic taunt, gJews will not replace us,h meant to
declare unity of the white race.
But to the President, those details did not
tell the whole story. Marching with the racists, fascists and separatists, he
argued, were some gvery fine peopleh with a worthy mission. gNot all of those
people were neo-Nazis, believe me,h he said on Aug. 15 at a press conference in
the lobby of Trump Tower. gNot all of those people were white supremacists.
Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of
the statue of Robert E. Lee.h
The Confederate general has sat on his
horse in Charlottesvillefs Emancipation Park (formerly Lee Park) since 1924,
when monuments were going up across the South in celebration of
post-Reconstruction revival amid the ongoing injustice of Jim Crow segregation.
To Trump, calls for the statuefs removal were the start of a slippery slope
that threatened to undermine the nationfs history and culture. gI wonder, is it
George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?h he
asked reporters at the event, conflating the nationfs founders with rebels who
fought to divide it. gYou really do have to ask yourself, Where
does it stop?h
That is a question many Americans found
themselves asking in the days after the violent melees claimed the life of
Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal, and injured
more than 30 others. In the face of a fatal riot instigated by bigots–the
largest demonstration of white power in at least a decade–here was a President
defending the gathering, legitimizing a hateful ideology in the process. He
decried racism and bigotry, but also blamed liberal counterprotesters,
some of whom had come armed with sticks and mace, as equally culpable for the
violence. Then he alleged a conspiracy in the press to avoid naming all the
aggressors. gYou had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on
the other side that was also very violent,h he said. gNobody wants to say that,
but I will say it right now.h
The off-the-cuff press conference didnft
just throw a wrench in the weary White House damage-control operation. It swept
away any lingering delusions that Trump will harness the high office to unify a
bitterly divided country. American Presidents have often sought to seize the
aftermath of a national tragedy to rally the nation together and point us
beyond our history. This is the impulse that guided Ronald Reagan after the
Challenger explosion, Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, George W.
Bush after Sept. 11 and Barack Obama after the Charleston church shooting. But
that is not Trump. Asked whether he would heed presidential custom by visiting
the site of the tragedy, Trump replied that he owned a very large winery near
Charlottesville.
His response was panned as a missed
opportunity and massive error, not just by his foes but by scores of
Republicans. It led Trump on Aug. 16 to preemptively dissolve two separate
advisory councils of top CEOs after a string of resignations. But his stance
was no accident. It was a reminder that in some ways, Trump sees the world in
the same us-against-them tones that inform his most racist supporters.
Throughout his business career, he used racial and ethnic divisions to his
advantage. He sees the cultural norms that seek to minimize racial strife as
gpolitically correcth barriers to free expression. Trump declared during the
presidential campaign that an American with Mexican-born parents could not
fairly adjudicate a case in which Trump was a party because of his immigration
policies. On the campaign trail, he recited lyrics to a song that compared
Muslim refugees to venomous snakes. Now, in the Oval Office, he is using the
pulpit to tolerate and fan tribal grievance.
In the immediate aftermath of the violence
in Charlottesville, Trump pledged to gheal the wounds of our country.h Less
than 48 hours later, he called reporters who asked about his refusal to
specifically condemn the racism gtruly bad people.h And he lashed out at others
who came forward to criticize him. Trumpfs longtime political Svengali Roger
Stone has a maxim: gPolitics is not about uniting people,h he told the New
Yorker in 2008. gItfs about dividing people. And getting your 51%.h
That is not so far from the methods and goals of a revitalized white-nationalist movement, which sees in Trump a welcome partner. gThank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville,h tweeted David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, whose current ambition, like many at the rally, is the creation of an all-white American ethnostate.
If there is a central theme to Trumpfs
first months in office, it has been his inability to adapt his demagogic
impulses to his vast new responsibilities. At times, he will contain those
instincts at the advice of his aides. Two days after the violence in
Charlottesville, he stood before a teleprompter in the basement of the White
House with a clear message of blame. gRacism is evil,h he declared with the
enthusiasm of a hostage victim. But such staged moments rarely last; hours
later he tweeted regrets, writing that his critics gwill never be satisfied.h
Then, just days after vehicular terrorism in Charlottesville killed a young
woman, the President retweeted a photo of a train running over a man with the
CNN logo on his face. (He later deleted it.)
All of which delights the angry white
torchbearers. The new faces of American hate are now more likely to be a
college-educated Internet trolls than goose-stepping skinheads. Instead of
robes or hoods, they favor natty suits and New Balance sneakers, white polos
and khaki pants. Dubbed the alt-right, they are a constellation of groups that
organize online, delight in ironic and coded forms of communication, and
typically have little actual influence outside of anonymous message boards and
the comments section of revisionist YouTube videos that declare Adolf Hitlerfs
greatness.
Among this new racist right inspiration
often comes from European fascist groups like Golden Dawn in Greece, the
neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement and the ultranationalist Russian
philosopher Alexander Dugin, a close ally of Vladimir
Putinfs. Their anger is directed at what they see as the dwindling fortunes of
the white working class in America–an idea that the President has homed in on
as well.
Charlottesville was meant as a coming-out
party for this loose collection of furies, and in that narrow way it was a
success. Even in its wake, the organizers were denying that they had anything
to do with the racist terrorism of the past. When Trump finally called out some
of the groups that wreaked havoc in the leafy college town, members of the
movement wrote off the rebuke as meant for others. gPerfect!h wrote a prominent
white-nationalist YouTube broadcaster who evangelizes under the Twitter name
Wife With a Purpose. gSince the Alt Right and #UniteTheRight are neither Nazis, KKK or white supremacists,
therefs no issue then.h This same activist has issued a national gwhite baby
challenge,h arguing that increased Caucasian fertility is the best way to fight
gblack ghetto culture.h
The themes that protesters pointed to were
often ones that Trump has harped on. Many said they were radicalized in recent
years by the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests spawned by the deaths
of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, which catalyzed a kind of status anxiety.
According to a Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll from the spring,
28% of the country believes that whites losing out because of minority
preferences is a bigger problem than minorities losing out because of white
preferences. Among those who gstrongly approveh of Trump, 46% say that whites
losing out is the bigger concern. gIt was inevitable that it would finally dawn
on whites that we are being dismantled,h says Jared Taylor, head of the
white-nationalist group American Renaissance. gWe donft wish to be replaced.h
The rally in Charlottesville, called Unite the Right, was organized by Jason Kessler, a native of
the city who runs an obscure group called Unity and Security for America, which
advocates for immigration policies that favor whites. Among the allies on the
ground were Vanguard America, which calls itself the gface of American fascismh
and traffics in slogans like Free yourself, White Man.
There were representatives from Identity Evropa,
which espouses white separatism; members of the Traditionalist Worker Party,
which is led by white supremacist Matthew Heimbach
and runs candidates for local office; and representatives from the League of
the South, who brandished Confederate flags.
For this network of white grievance, Trump
has been a godsend. gFinally someone at the level of presidential politics is
speaking their language,h explains Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Center for
Right-Wing Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. gThis was a
providential deliverance. He mobilized them in a way that has no precedent.h
Racial politics have always been central to
Trumpfs brand. By late 2015, when he had taken the lead in Republican polls, he
credited his rise to two issues that spoke directly to the concerns of white
nationalists: immigration and Islamic terrorism. gI felt it like I do deals,h
he bragged that year, describing his sense for the fears and anger of his
voters. gImmigration has boiled over into Syria.h Throughout his campaign, his
method was to use racial anxieties to his advantage, while periodically
offering vague condemnations of racism. As Kessler put it, Trump gappeals to
white people because we feel like we can compete and have a good shot at the
American Dream when we donft have things like affirmative action or illegal
immigration holding us back and stacking the game against us.h
Trumpfs main selling point was a pledge to
demolish the accepted barriers of political conduct. gWe have to be mean now,h
he would say. That meanness often overlapped with messages of white-nationalist
groups that argue that there are essential differences among races that make a
diverse society unworkable. In early January 2016, at a rally in Iowa, Trump
debuted a new feature of his stump speech, reading the lyrics of a 1960s pop
song called gThe Snake,h which Trump turned into an allegory for the danger posed
by Muslim immigration. The point of the story is that there was something
fundamentally malicious about snakes, and by extension Muslims. gYou knew damn
well I was a snake before you took me in,h the snake tells a gtenderhearted
womanh at the narrativefs climax, after he has given her a gvicious bite.h
Flirting with the fringes of the racist
right became a running theme. When asked about the support of former KKK leader
Duke by CNN, Trump declined to distance himself for several days. When he later
retweeted a racist meme with false statistics about black crime rates against
whites, he refused to correct the information. gItfs for other people,h he told
TIME. gLet them find out if itfs correct or not.h
At other times, he retweeted supporters who
openly espoused white-nationalist beliefs, only to have his staff members claim
that he had no idea who they were. Asked by TIME in 2015 if his campaign
rhetoric could lead to innocent people getting hurt, Trump responded with a
sense of victimization similar to what drove so many young men to march in
Charlottesville. gPeople are getting hurt far greater,h he responded, gthan
something I am going to say.h