To the surprise of no one who has followed Donald Trump's career over the past 40 years-the 1973 lawsuit over anti-black discrimination, his persecution of the innocent Central Park 5, his birther crusade, the entire 2016 presidential campaign --the president backtracked on his bold "nazis are bad" stance from Monday to say, about the "Jews won't replace us"-chanting far-righters, that there were "a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest . . . you had people that were very fine people."

As for the counter-protesters, they were from "a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent," according to our dear leader. One of those anti-racist protesters, Heather Heyer, was murdered by a white supremacist during an act of domestic terrorism that closely resembled the tactics of ISIS supporters in Europe. After falsely insinuating that Heyer's mother had praised him, Trump castigated the activists who fought alongside her: "There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You've just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group . . . yes, I think there is blame on both sides."

Trump switched from blaming "many sides," as he did on Saturday, to blaming "both sides." He is right that there are two sides: the vestigial tail of the Confederacy and the United States of America, the white supremacists and their targets, the president and the patriots. It is also obvious he favors the side of the nazis. This has been evident since Trump launched his campaign. It became clearer when he hesitated to denounce David Duke in February 2016. It was blindingly obvious on Saturday in his initial reaction to Charlottesville.

That journalists and politicians spent two years grossly underestimating Trump's racism has allowed it to flourish. A dog whistle became the tune of a pied piper, inspiring Caucasian partisans to parade their prejudices, and it became a bullhorn once Trump was safely ensconced as president. Despite pundit predictions, Trump never planned to pivot: His goal was always instead to pivot Americans to his sick views, to pull the fringes to the center and make extremism mainstream. He has to some degree succeeded: In 2016, racist ideology reentered not only American political discourse but seemingly the White House itself, in the form of Steve Bannon, Seb Gorka, and Stephen Miller.

Since Saturday, the call for the resignation of these three advisors have intensified. More tepid is the call for the resignation of Confederacy buff Jeff Sessions, the attorney general who seeks to strip non-white citizens of their rights. Under Sessions, the DOJ has backed anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-Muslim, and anti-voter rights initiatives, proving that this administration's threat is not merely rhetorical. The white supremacist House runs the gamut from nascent nazis like Miller to respectability racists like Sessions, but they all should be taken down like the Confederate statues their side defends. There are many reasons for Trump to go down with them--emoluments violations, obstruction of justice, high crimes and misdemeanors--with his speech on Tuesday yet another indicator he is unfit to be president.