In Wednesday’s edition of his morning newsletter, Axios Executive Editor Mike Allen reflected on the wildly disappointing press conference President Trump held the afternoon before by contending his remarks on the violence in Charlottesville, Va. “[set] us back decades” on race relations.
“It started with the dog-whistle presidential campaign: constant plays — some subtle, some blaring — on racial fears,” Allen wrote. “But it wasn’t until the past five days — in a fight over a Southern statue narrowly, and the stain of slavery broadly — that President Trump officially and indelibly divided the nation over race: setting us back decades, at least for now, in our common purpose of healing old, awful wounds.”
The assertion that our country was rocketed that far backwards by one rambling press conference held by an unpopular president strikes me as unproductive hyperbole.
The country will only be set back decades if we allow it to be set back by decades. And so far, that has not happened. There is almost unanimous agreement among leaders of both political parties and the media that Trump’s press conference was objectionable at best and abhorrent at worst. Decades ago, that would not have been the case. Widespread disgust with the president’s statements is a clear indication society has come quite a long way, and that’s still the case.
The president’s baffling insistence upon arguing there were good people among the crowd of torch-bearing white nationalists on Friday is egregious for energizing and validating racists and bigots. But, thankfully, those people remain small in number, still relegated to the fringes of society by our collective standards of decency.
In the past half-century alone, too much blood has been spilled moving the country forward for us to now claim Trump could undo those gains instantly. No doubt, we’re more divided over race now than we were in, say, 2009. But the progress America has made over the course of decades, away from a time when the president’s behavior would not have been widely condemned by the political mainstream, will not be reversed unless we let it be.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
