14-08-2017, 02:07 PM
AUG 13, 2017[URL="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/charlottesville-end-denial-trump/#"]
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After Charlottesville: End the Denial About Trump
Rescue personnel help people injured when a car ran into a crowd protesting a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va,, on Saturday. (Steve Helber / AP)
It should not have taken the death and injury of innocents to move our nation toward moral clarity. It should not have taken President Trump's disgraceful refusal to condemn white supremacy, bigotry and Nazism to make clear to all who he is and which dark impulses he is willing to exploit to maintain his hold on power.
Those of us who are white regularly insist that the racists and bigots are a minority of us and that the white-power movement is a marginal and demented faction.
This is true, and the mayhem in Charlottesville, Virginia, called forth passionate condemnations of blood-and-soil nationalism across the spectrum of ideology. These forms of witness were a necessary defense of the American idea and underscored the shamefulness of Trump's embrace of moral equivalence. There are not, as Trump insisted Saturday, "many sides" to questions that were settled long ago: Racism, anti-Semitism, discrimination and white supremacy are unequivocally wrong.
A president who cannot bring himself to say this immediately and unequivocally squanders any claim to moral leadership.
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After Charlottesville: End the Denial About Trump
![[Image: charlottesvilledionne_798.jpg]](https://www.truthdig.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/charlottesvilledionne_798.jpg)
Those of us who are white regularly insist that the racists and bigots are a minority of us and that the white-power movement is a marginal and demented faction.
This is true, and the mayhem in Charlottesville, Virginia, called forth passionate condemnations of blood-and-soil nationalism across the spectrum of ideology. These forms of witness were a necessary defense of the American idea and underscored the shamefulness of Trump's embrace of moral equivalence. There are not, as Trump insisted Saturday, "many sides" to questions that were settled long ago: Racism, anti-Semitism, discrimination and white supremacy are unequivocally wrong.
A president who cannot bring himself to say this immediately and unequivocally squanders any claim to moral leadership.