Certainly, the words of condemnation for racism and racist hate groups should have been delivered more quickly by President Donald Trump in the aftermath of the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, Saturday.
He should have thrown political considerations to the wind and come out immediately and unequivocally against the neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other white nationalists who have considered him a friend in the White House.
Even if his words were belated, however, Trump deserves credit for saying the right things on Monday when he renounced racism, called white nationalists who engage in violence “criminals and thugs,” promised that those involved in the death of an anti-racist counter-protester would be prosecuted, and called for this bitterly divided nation to “rediscover the bonds of loyalty and love that bring us together as Americans.”
Whether he sincerely believes these words or just was pressured into saying them by his advisers and fellow Republicans, it’s not for us to judge. We don’t know what’s in Donald Trump’s heart, nor does anyone else other than the president himself and his creator.
It is, moreover, unfair for his critics to jump on the president for initially failing to denounce the hate groups that descended on Charlottesville this past weekend, and then when he does so, to jump on him again because it took two days longer than it should have.
It will be fair, though, to criticize the president if he doesn’t follow through in his own conduct with the greater civility he is asking from all Americans. It is easy to say everyone needs to behave better, but those words will ring hollow if the head of our national government doesn’t himself behave better.
That is asking a lot, as Trump doesn’t seem to be particularly malleable. Rather than try to defuse criticism, his knee-jerk response is to lash out at those who challenge him or whom he believes have been disloyal. He uses his Twitter account almost pathologically to bully and to insult. Just hours before he made his plea for unity and love, he ridiculed on Twitter the African-American CEO of pharmaceutical giant Merck, who resigned from a presidential advisory council over Trump’s initial handling of developments in Charlottesville. If the president were to be tested on the principles of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” he’d fail miserably.
This abrasive, confrontational style has won him admirers on the far right, but it has contributed to the degeneration of public discourse. We have become a nation that is perpetually in verbal attack mode — a condition that can lead, as Charlottesville demonstrated, to fisticuffs and worse.
Let’s pray the president recognizes that with his awesome power also comes the awesome responsibility to lower this dangerous level of domestic rancor.
