Say it with me: Donald Trump is a racist. Let the words sit in your mouth and chew them over, because this next bit may be hard to swallow for the apologists who applauded his statement yesterday that "racism is evil" and that the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists are "criminals and thugs."
Related | Trump Finally Says 'Racism is Evil' Three Days After Charlottesville Protests
Under our president, a lot can happen in a day or hour or even a minute. On Monday, Trump denounced racism and, today, he's thrown that all away with a disastrous press conference. Here's the key difference between these two events: Trump followed the script yesterday.
Trump denounced these groups because of overwhelming pressure from Democrats, Republicans, and the media, but then, when the criticism didn't die down, today's press conference happened. Well, no. Actually, first came this morning's image--retweeted and then deleted by Trump--of a train running over a man with the CNN logo plastered onto his face.
The image would be tasteless in any context but, given that a woman named Heather Heyer was killed a few days ago after a white supremacist plowed a car intro a group of protesters, it's particularly vile. Now, hours later, we've been given further confirmation about where our White Supremacist in Chief's values fall.
In a tense exchange with reporters who rightfully criticized his response to the deadly violence in Charlottesville over the weekend, Trump went after the allegedly "very very violent" groups of "alt-left" protesters, saying: "You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent." For context, the tiki-torch carrying Nazi group from Friday night had a permit, which apparently makes what they did okay.
He also critiqued the push to have statues and monuments of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other noted white supremacists and slave owners taken down, claiming, "Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?"
Oh yeah, and he also said that he'd waited three days to condemn white nationalists and KKK members because, according to him, "Before I make a statement, I like to know the facts." No word on where that mantra was when he spent a year spearheading the fake "birther" movement that claimed Obama wasn't a natural-born citizen.
It is within these off-the-cuff remarks that we're able to confirm what we should already know--Donald Trump is a racist. Long before he took the Oval Office, he was ordering "all the black [employees] off the floor" of his Atlantic City casinos during his visits, claiming that "laziness is a trait in blacks" and "not anything they can control," described undocumented Mexican immigrants as "rapists," and so many other things. This is a man whose own father was arrested in 1927 at a KKK rally.
Our president can say that "racism is evil" all he wants. but when it only takes him a day to throw that statement away in favor of attacking the counter protesters who risked their lives to stand up to white nationalists with torches and guns, we don't need to rely on scripted statements to know what kind of person our president is.
