At this point, 3 days after Nazis marched through an American city, killing one woman and terrorizing thousands of peaceful citizens, there is nothing that Trump could say that would do him any good. It’s simply not enough to come to the American people 72 hours after white supremacists have rioted and killed an innocent human being, clearly having been forced to make another statement when the first one should have been a no-brainer slam dunk (“Nazis are bad.”), and mouth words that he obviously doesn’t believe. Sorry, but he’s missed his opportunity–the damage has been done, and that particular window has now closed.
Is a reluctant statement better than no statement at all?
No.
Anything Trump says now will be empty words, and the time for Trump’s words has passed. It’s now time for action.
So what would help?
Trump needs to remove Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka from the White House immediately–not throw a Twitter-fit at Ken Frazier, the black CEO who resigned from Trump’s manufacturing council in the aftermath of Trump’s refusal to condemn a Nazi attack on US soil.
Consider: It took Trump 3 days to comment on the Nazi attacks in Charlottesville; it took mere seconds for him to attack Frazier after he resigned from the council.
Actions speak louder than words.
The only other thing that Trump could do at this point would be to apologize–to say he is sorry for waiting too long to address this tragedy, for failing to identify the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and alt-right as being the groups responsible for this terror, for suggesting the false equivalency of hatred and violence coming from “many sides…many sides”, and for failing to provide the leadership that our country demands and deserves from the President during national emergencies like that one that was perpetrated on Charlottesville by these white hate groups.
But of course, this is a man who has never apologized for anything in his life, and in fact has written that he doesn’t believe that apologizing for anything is a “good business practice.” So we can expect an indifferent denunciation of these groups, delivered in a casual, dismissive manner, in the least amount of words and time possible–with quick pivots to how it’s not his fault, that racism is a problem that’s been plaguing our nation for “a very long time”–and perhaps an insinuation or two that the real culprits here are:
• the counter protesters themselves for “limiting the First Amendment protections of the protesters to exercise their God-given free speech rights”
• the Democratic leadership of the state of Virginia and the city of Charlottesville
• President Obama
• Hillary Clinton
• and the “fake news” media
I wish I was kidding.
And I wish this person was not our President.
