When Trump has a chance to condemn white supremacy, he panders to it instead.
When President Donald Trump is upset with you, he will let you know. This has been a hard rule about Trump — to the point it’s hard to believe any feud is too petty or too far for him. From Rosie O’ Donnell to the family of a dead US military veteran, Trump has been ready to condemn just about everyone who gets in his way.
A couple weeks into his presidency, Trump even bashed the US retailer Nordstrom on Twitter: “My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!” There, he used the power of the White House to attempt to throw a job-creating US company under the bus just because it had let go of his daughter’s clothing line.
But when it comes to white supremacists, Trump’s statements are uncharacteristically tepid.
After white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and members of the Ku Klux Klan descended onto Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend and caused chaos and violence in the small city (leading to at least three deaths) , Trump gave a strangely vague response that didn’ t blame anyone in particular: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides.”
Asked to clarify the statement, a White House official doubled down: “The President was condemning hatred, bigotry and violence from all sources and all sides. There was violence between protesters and counter protesters today.” It was only after a day of criticism that the White House — but, crucially, not Trump himself — clarified that when he condemned violence and bigotry on “many sides, ” “of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazis and all extremist groups.”
These are groups who literally want to violently rid the country of entire races and ethnic groups (some by genocide, some by forced eviction) , and showed up to a small Virginia city to start trouble because it was getting rid of its pro-slavery Confederate monuments. Yet the president of the United States had trouble castigating the specific parties involved, even as other members of his political party — from Paul Ryan to Marco Rubio — called the problem for what it was: bigotry and white supremacy.
We can never truly say what’s in Trump’s heart and mind. But there’s a pattern here: Time and time again, when Trump has a chance to condemn white supremacists, he panders to them instead. And that pandering is unlike what he does with nearly any other people and groups he dislikes.
There have been many, many articles written about how no feud is too petty for Trump. The New York Times, for instance, keeps an ongoing count of all the people, places, and things that Trump has insulted on Twitter. As of late July, he had bashed more than 350 people, places, and things.
Of course, Trump doesn’ t just randomly insult people on Twitter; he often does it with his mouth too.
It’s helpful to look at some of the people Trump has bashed over the past few years. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it gives you a pretty good indication of how vast Trump’s feuds spread:
The list really could go on and on.
In fact, this is a crucial part to Trump’s public persona. That he’s so willing to stand up to anyone he sees as a threat is one of the things that made some people like Trump in the first place.
Take, for instance, his position on terrorism. Trump consistently bashed Obama and Clinton for failing to call out, from his view, “radical Islamic terrorism” — never mind that there are important national security considerations for not using that phrase. To a lot of Trump supporters, this dog whistle about Muslims spoke to who the real enemy is, and they loved that he was willing to call it out even if it wasn’ t “politically correct.”
So when there’s an attack that may have been caused by a Muslim perpetrator, Trump quickly jumps on Twitter to declare it as terrorism — even before the authorities have confirmed anything — and will use it to push his policies, such as his travel ban .
Yet when it comes to white supremacists, Trump takes a very different approach.
It’s not just Trump’s comments on Saturday that were tepid. On the campaign trail, Trump was just as vague when it came to condemning some of the white nationalists and other extremists who had come to endorse him.
When he appeared on CNN’s State of the Union in February last year, host Jake Tapper gave him what should be a pretty easy task: condemn the KKK. Trump dodged.
Here’s the exchange, which is really worth reading in full to see just how evasive Trump is when asked to, out of all things, condemn a KKK grand wizard:
For the record, Trump had, in the past, known plenty about David Duke. When Trump declined to run for president in 2000 as a member of the Reform Party, he said that he didn’ t want to be associated with Duke, who had supported Pat Buchanan’s nomination for the Reform Party. Trump at the time called Duke “a bigot, a racist, a problem.” This only seemed to change once he began running for president in 2015.
Trump did eventually disassociate himself with Duke a few days after the Tapper interview, when he finally said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, “David Duke is a bad person, who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years.” He added, “I disavowed him. I disavowed the KKK.” He later blamed his initial refusal to do so on Tapper’s show on a faulty earpiece, which doesn’ t make much sense if you look at the transcript.
But even how Trump eventually rebuked Duke was uncharacteristic. When Trump finds a target, he usually uses evocative language to criticize them — such as when he suggested that Rosie O’ Donnell is a “fat pig” at a Republican debate, and when he nicknamed his Republican primary opponents “Little Marco” and “Lyin ‘Ted.” With white supremacists, he used nearly passive language.
The same issue would pop up later in the year, when Trump was elected and reporters once again asked him if he accepted the support of white nationalists. Trump used his now typical passive language for white supremacists, saying, “I don’ t want to energize the group, and I disavow the group.”
Then came Saturday, when Trump, instead of blaming the chaos in Charlottesville on white supremacists, blamed “many sides.” It was only after repeated criticism that the White House — but, again, not Trump himself — clarified the statement to mention “extremist groups.”
Once again, the pattern repeated itself: Trump did some pandering to racists, only for him or his staff to vaguely and tepidly clarify what he was saying — but only after it was too late.
Here’s the thing: It’s not just Trump’s critics who see what Trump is doing as pandering. White supremacists see it this way too, and they love Trump for it.
