Let’s cut to the heart of a big problem with Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville over the last few days: They were ignorant and inarticulate.
Trump is a genius at communicating in very unorthodox ways. He’s like Rain Man when it comes to trolling the media. (For example, when he tweeted out the GIF of him “wrestling” the CNN logo, the network covered it extensively and ended up widely condemned for going after the private citizen who created the GIF.) Frankly, however, Trump sucks at speaking in a conventional, straightforward manner. It’s inexcusable for the president of the United States to be unclear about violent hate groups. Here’s the rough transcript of his most controversial remarks yesterday (emphasis added):
If the line that “You also had some very fine people on both sides,” wasn’t enough to set everyone off, there was his general insistence that not everyone at the rally to protect the Confederate monuments was bad. He just seems tragically wrong on the merits about whether there was anyone respectable in attendance. (And I would be very curious to know what photos of the rally he saw.) However, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists. They should be condemned totally,” is a pretty clear statement. Trump hasn’t been earning the benefit of the doubt these days, but Trump, as ever, is also not playing 3-D chess. Getting defensive about his ignorance about who was at the rally seems much more plausible than the accusation he’s knowingly spreading disinformation about the respectability of the rally.
Here’s the other problem. Trump is kind of an aural Rorschach test. He speaks in a very circuitous style, and so people trying to follow along tend to pluck out the sentiments that confirm their priors. Trump supporters heard “They should be condemned totally” and critics and the media only heard the factually incorrect equivocation. The former think the latter have been unfair in saying he didn’t condemn Nazis. This is not an entirely unfair criticism, but that must be weighed against the equivocation.
During the campaign, Trump’s unorthodox speaking style allowed him to hide behind a degree of ambiguity and cause the media to overreact to his statements. He’s president now, and force and clarity, especially when the need to condemn Nazis arises, are job requirements.
But as someone who thinks the media in the era of Trump—on many sides—has been acting pretty badly, where does this particular criticism of the media get us? Let’s start with some logical premises:
1) It’s fair to say that 99.999 percent of Americans think that Nazis and the KKK are bad. The few hundred people in Charlottesville are still a very small, very fringe movement, dangerous though they may be. Americans by and large still want law and order and and most people believe in equality in the abstract, even if they have trouble practicing it. No one wants lynchings and putsches.
2) Democrats have, for decades, endlessly compared Nazis and the KKK to mainstream GOP figures and their harmless ideology. This is not really disputable. Here’s a recent example of the well-worn genre, that was both a rather prominent New York Times piece and so unhinged that it even smeared well-known opponents of Trump on the right, such as Jonah Goldberg. But many myths about the right being tied to violence and racist hate groups have been unfairly perpetuated for a long time now.
3) If Americans agree the Nazis and the KKK are bad, Nazis and the KKK can’t be continually redefined to include people who are nothing of the sort without, at some point, making condemning actual Nazis and Klan members a loaded political issue that should never be political. Trump owed us all a clear, unequivocal statement from the get-go and exacerbated the problem. But Trump’s defensiveness, as unhelpful as it may have been, does speak for a lot of people who are sick and tired of being called racist just because they vote Republican.
4) Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Family Research Council shooting, where a gay activist showed up at the Christian group’s building with a 9mm handgun intent on carrying out a mass killing, after finding the organization on a “hate map” produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center.. He shot the group’s’ African-American building manager, who still managed to heroically stop him The sum total of the Obama’s comment on a domestic terror incident that took place within walking distance of the White House was a vague statement four hours later through a spokesman about how “violence of that kind has no place in our society.” Press secretary Jay Carney declined to answer a direct question the next day whether shooting a black man at point blank range because he opposed gay marriage was a “hate crime.” The subsequent media coverage either ignored or downplayed the shooter’s motivations. The double standards here are very real.
5) Still that shouldn’t get in the way of making the condemnation of Nazis an easy straightforward thing, aside from the fact that diagrams of Trump’s sentences looks like one of those Family Circus cartoons where we trace Billy’s path all over the playground (look it up, millennials). But we are at a point where it’s become a highly politicized thing and “many sides”—whether it’s the Bannon wing of the right fomenting the alt-right or the backlash created by the entire lefty media establishment calling Mitt Romney racist for months in 2012 for the sin of praising welfare reform—are indeed responsible for this total breakdown in discourse. Perhaps we were headed inevitably to this destination regardless, but the last thing we needed is Trump stepping on the accelerator.
In conclusion, if you’re concerned about a weaponized media destroying the right—and I happen to think this is a very valid concern because Trump may not be with us in a few years, but the media will be—Trump needs to put down the shovel and acknowledge the harm he’s done. If he resents the way his remarks are twisted, he has himself to blame for being unclear in his condemnatory remarks and ignorant of who was at that rally. He’s undeniably accelerated the removalof cConfederate monuments, which may not be a bad thing in and of itself, but doing so under cover of night without public debate or due process, is Orwellian and seems likely to exacerbate cultural divisions and empower these hate groups making an issue of it.
Trump’s base has cheered him on in his willingness to confront the media, saying “But he fights!” But part of fighting effectively is knowing when to pick your battles, and then knowing when to retreat and fight another day when it’s a lost cause. There may be good reasons for Trump to gripe about the media, but to say that an incident of actual racist murder, violence, and mayhem is not the best a springboard to repeatedly double down on the issue of unfair accusations of racism the issue might be the understatement of the millennium.
