Among all the fallout from Donald Trump's moral equivalency rant Tuesday that revealed him to be a white supremacist sympathizer is the realization that as of 12 PM ET the following day, not one single person working in his White House had resigned.
Never in my lifetime have I seen a more important historical moment than this—a time at which our country’s moral certitude is being tested. We have been struggling with issues of racism and white supremacy since the very founding of our nation, but never in modern times has our country been led by someone with such moral depravity that they would defend the actions of a hate-filled group of marchers who showed up looking to crack skulls and ultimately murdered an innocent woman.
Last August, Hillary Clinton warned that Trump was “taking a hate movement mainstream”—she could not have been more accurate. The disconcerting difference between her words then and Trump’s words yesterday is that he is mainstreaming that hate from the Oval Office—the nerve center of our government.
Republican lawmakers haven’t yet found the backbone to stand up for their country following a political moment that has rattled the nation and threatens to push us toward more violence. They are apparently content to condemn neo-Nazis but stand idly by as their commander in chief justifies neo-Nazi violence that takes innocent lives. Only one among them—John McCain, a bona fide war hero—had the guts to directly urge Trump to unequivocally denounce the racists. Perhaps when you’ve signed up to give your life for this country, when you’ve really pondered what it meant for all those men to rush the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, to near certain death, when you spend five years in a tiny cell fighting for another breath of freedom—the promise of that freedom for every American is precious enough to take a stand against evil even when it comes from within your own ranks. Paul Ryan, a lifelong politician, clearly knows nothing of that.
And then there’s Trump’s White House aides and administration officials. Unless they leave, they’re all complicit in his mainstreaming of hateful ideologies that, for centuries, have lynched and murdered with impunity in this country and abroad have systematically sought to eliminate entire ethnicities. The choice was crystal clear for some Republicans, like former RNC communications director Doug Heye.
If anyone inside Trump’s administration needs a reference point, that’s what an actual stand looks like.
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