AUGUST 14, 2017
Photo: AP
It all seemed so ridiculous on Friday.
Several hundred neo-Nazi protesters marched through the University of Virginia at Charlottesville on Friday night, with many clad in polo shirts carrying torches. (As Joan Walsh of The Nation called them, “Preppy man-boys with their mommy’s Polynesian tiki torches.” Bed Bath & Beyond tiki torches??? Oooh, scary!) Yes, they had some of the angry faces of Hitler Youth from the 1930s, but, as terrifying as they wanted to be, the whole thing felt like some twisted Halloween prank, as if they wanted to fulfill some deep dark fantasy before going back to their dorm rooms to watch “Game of Thrones.”
Saturday, however, was a different story.
I poured my morning coffee and turned on the TV to see what appeared to be a much more militant bunch of neo-Nazis, complete with shields, swinging their fists in Charlottesville at a crowd that came to object to the presence of white supremacists in their college town. Meanwhile, the Charlottesville police appeared to simply stand by and watched. (Giving them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it was a strategy to hold back so as not to inflame the situation, but optics-wise and on live TV, it was a bad one.)
Eventually when the Charlottesville police did move in, they were finally able to separate the neo-Nazis from the protestors. The helicopters manned by Virginia state troopers who had been monitoring (and presumably recording) the situation then finally flew away from the scene, and all seemed to be calm.
Until it wasn’t.
Several hours later, after being dispersed, the anti-Nazi protestors were milling about in one area, and there two cars stopped to let protestors cross the street. Suddenly, a car behind the first two autos deliberately accelerated and smashed into one of the vehicles, forcing the first car forward into the crowd, killing one woman and injuring 19 others. (In addition, the aforementioned Virginia State Troopers’ helicopter that flew away from the riot scene crashed and killed the two Virginia state troopers inside.)
One would have certainly expected the President of the United States to have a comment to try to comfort the nation.
Instead, crickets.
Trump finally appeared several hours later, in the midst of his golf vacation (another one), and denounced violence in Charlottesville that was perpetrated “from many sides.” MANY sides? These are Nazis!
The political blowback was almost immediate, but the interesting thing was that it most quickly came from Republicans. It would seem like the easiest layup in the world to denounce neo-Nazis, but when Trump failed to do that (among his many failures this weekend), it took one of the most conservative GOP senators, Orrin Hatch, to be the first to denounce the violence in Charlottesville, a denunciation that Trump had initially refused to do.
After a Sunday with no comment from the Chief Executive, it wasn’t until Monday afternoon that Trump, bowing to increasing pressure, finally faced the press with a criticism of “white supremacists.” There was no labeling it as “terrorism” — that’s a charge that Trump would easily make when someone in Paris or London would plow into a crowd with his car — and certainly no renunciation of the support that white nationalists gave (and continue to give) to Trump’s presidency.
I’m not quite sure if Charlottesville will become Trump’s equivalent to Bush’s Katrina catastrophe in leadership, but it does reveal one interesting thing — if the political climate allows them, Congressional Republicans will run away from Trump as fast as they can. And that may be the most lasting takeaway from this awful weekend.
