Embraced by neofascists, Trump is the 1st un-American president

Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2017 | 2 a.m.

As became clear Tuesday at Trump Tower, we now have a president who is loath to fight Nazis.

The unimaginable has happened.

The leader of the nation that sacrificed more than 400,000 of its sons and daughters in a desperate fight to prevent global conquest by white supremacists in World War II once again blamed counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va., for helping cause the violence there over this past weekend.

Offered an opportunity to heal wounds that he caused by waiting two days to issue a rote condemnation of neo-Nazis for the horrific situation, President Donald Trump instead offered cover for them by echoing sentiments he expressed on Saturday via a statement that the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer raved about as being “really, really good.”

“OK, what about the alt-left that came charging them?” Trump said. “Excuse me. What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?”

With that, what might have seemed inconceivable at one time became reality. A U.S. president defended neofascist racists who swarmed into Charlottesville from elsewhere over counterprotesters, many of them residents of the community, who countered them by representing our nation’s cherished values of equality and inclusion.

Yes, the rally did draw members of Antifa, short for anti-fascists, a group that has occasionally used vandalism and acts of violence in opposition to neo-Nazis and other hate groups. And if activists from Antifa or any other group instigated any violence, they should be prosecuted.

However, there’s no question that the torch-bearing neo-Nazis, not counterprotesters from groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter, were overwhelmingly responsible for the tragedy, in which 32-year-old Heather Heyer died and 19 other people were injured when a 20-year-old man Nazi sympathizer and was fascinated with Nazi ideology drove his car into a group of counterprotesters. In addition, two state troopers died when the helicopter from which they were monitoring the situation crashed.

With his comments Tuesday, Trump showed clearly that his condemnations from Saturday and Monday — the latter of which he read woodenly from a teleprompter — were hollow. Trump knows that white supremacists are part of his base, and he’s not about to alienate them.

If you think that’s an overstatement, consider the response Trump received from white supremacist David Duke via Twitter: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa.”

Disgusting. This is a president who routinely invoked the names of World War II generals on the campaign trail to appeal to pro-military voters, and he now is drawing praise from believers in the ideology that those same generals — along with those 400,000-plus service members who sacrificed their lives and 16 million-plus who served — risked all to oppose.

“Racism is evil,” he said Monday, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

Those words were true, and there was no need for Trump to do anything but continue to condemn the thugs who incited chaos and violence in Virginia.

Trump doesn’t get it. Americans fight Nazis and other fascists. Americans revile the existence of those groups’ ideology. Americans will wall off their demonstrations, marginalize them in society, oppose them relentlessly and condemn them unconditionally. Period.

It’s worth repeating: We now have a president who won’t do the same. He’ll attack the media with impunity, will vilify Muslims and will even besmirch members of his own administration and party, but he practically has to be cattle-prodded into putting white supremacists in their place.

There’s no rectifying this with an apology or another statement.

The president of the United States may be American by birth. But he’s clearly too cowardly to fight groups that Americans will not tolerate — neo-Nazis, the KKK and other white supremacists among them. That alone has made him the first un-American president, because this nation stands for fighting those hate groups, not coddling them.