JUST RACISM:

Donald Trump's ascent was hardly the first sign that Americans had not uniformly regarded Obama's election as an inspiring chapter in the country's fitful progress toward equality. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, had branded him the "food-stamp President." In the right-wing and white-nationalist media, Obama was, variously, a socialist, a Muslim, the Antichrist, a "liberal fascist," who was assembling his own Hitler Youth. A high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim that was part of the economic-stimulus package was a secret effort to connect the brothels of Nevada to the innocents at Disneyland. He was, by nature, suspect. "You just look at the body language, and there's something going on," Trump said, last summer. In the meantime, beginning on the day of Obama's first inaugural, the Secret Service fielded an unprecedented number of threats against the President's person. [...]

Last week, the world witnessed Obama's successor in the White House, unbound and unhinged, acting more or less as Obama had predicted. In 2015, a week after Trump had declared his candidacy, he spoke in favor of removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina's capitol: "Put it in the museum and let it go." But, last week, abandoning the customary dog whistle of previous Republican culture warriors, President Trump made plain his indulgent sympathy for neo-Nazis, Klan members, and unaffiliated white supremacists, who marched with torches, assault rifles, clubs, and racist and anti-Semitic slogans through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. One participant even adopted an isis terror tactic, driving straight into a crowd of people peaceably demonstrating against the racists. Trump had declared an "America First" culture war in his Inaugural Address, and now--as his poll numbers dropped, as he lost again and again in the courts and in Congress, as the Mueller investigation delved into his miserable business history, as more and more aides leaked their dismay--he had cast his lot with the basest of his base. There were some "very fine people" among the white nationalists, he said, and their "culture" should not be threatened.

Who could have predicted it? Anyone, really. Two years ago, the Daily Stormer, the foremost neo-Nazi news site in the country, called on white men to "vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests." Trump never spurned this current of his support. He invited it, exploited it. With Stephen Bannon, white nationalism won prime real estate in the West Wing. Bannon wrote much of the inaugural speech, and was branded "The Great Manipulator" in a Time cover story that bruised the Presidential ego. But Bannon has been marginalized for months. Last Friday, in the wake of Charlottesville, Trump finally pushed him out. He is headed back to Breitbart News. But he was staff; his departure is hardly decisive. The culture of this White House was, and remains, Trump's.

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