Opinion

It is sad to watch politicians, pundits, and CEOs  prance around the cesspool of white nationalism oozing from the Trump presidency.

I wanted him to say the right words.

Google “Jimmy Fallon + Trump” today, and you're bound to find fawning reviews of "The Tonight Show" host’s atypically sober remarks on Charlottesville—a speech in which he criticized the president for his reluctance to denounce white nationalists.

Dear fellow lefties,

This presidency is unconstitutional. The Constitution says you have to be at least 35 to serve in our highest office and our incumbent tantrum-in-a-suit is emotionally 6 years old.

Sometimes America feels like the movie Groundhog Day: a place where we keep waking up again and again to the same shit, hoping against hope that this time — no really, this time — things will be different.

As a scholar of modern German history, I've been working on a study of antisemitism in Germany and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What I saw unfold over the weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia and then at Bedminster, New Jersey gave me the horrible, sinking feeling that my book is going to need a new chapter.

Go home; leave the state; you’re not welcome.

I only spent less than a year in the Bible Belts of Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi in the early fifties and seventies, alien places for non-southerners. I first went South with the US Army before heading overseas, then as a writer, and finally as a tourist. Each time I carried with me southern-born W.J. Cash's fascinating 1941 book Mind of the South. A paragraph he wrote still sticks with me.

This weekend’s “Unite the Right” rally made horrifically literal the portrayal of blood-soaked streets depicted in promotional posters. The organizers accomplished two political feats as well. By uniting an array of racist and fascist organizations under the cause of a Confederate monument and the banner of Nazi Germany, “Unite the Right” starkly revealed the white supremacy and white nationalism at the root of Confederate civil religion.

In July of last year, after The New York post ran the headline, “CIVIL WAR: Four cops killed at anti-police protest,” I wrote the column “How We Report on Structural Racism Can Hurt Us—Or Heal Us.” I could have easily written the same article today.

Since Donald Trump has demonstrated that he lacks the moral gravity which necessitates that the President of the United States should be able to condemn hatred and white nationalist terrorism, we must rather turn to our brothers and sisters and provide our own moral guidance and support. It is our solemn duty to embrace one another, look racist hatred straight in the eye, identify it for what it is, and proclaim that it has no place in America. Indeed to assume that he simply lacks moral gravity is to perhaps give Trump too much of the benefit of the doubt. Rather, what seems increasingly likely is that in refusing to specifically condemn a white supremacist murdering peaceful anti-racist protestors on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, that he is sending a not-so-veiled message to his numerous supporters on the far-right. One needs to ask, how can Donald Trump condemn a foreign driver, in a foreign city, killing foreigners in an act of foreign terrorism, but when that exact same method of terrorism is employed in an American city we’re treated to a milquetoast, anodyne, reductionist, and most of all inaccurate banality about “many sides?” Just when will the president use the phrase “radical white supremacist terrorism?”

The violence in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday is a national calamity. It is a product of white supremacists and home grown terrorists.