At the White House on Monday, Donald Trump finally, and apparently reluctantly, addressed the racist cause of the violence that led to the deaths of three people during the so-called Unite the Right rally in the town of Charlottesville, Virginia.
Rather than reassuring his divided nation and party, rather than offering comfort to the families of the dead, the President's statement served to confirm the worst fears for Trump's presidency rather than the greatest hopes.
The rally on Saturday was attended by white supremacists and neo-Nazis protesting against the removal of Confederate statues. One man was filmed marching with a Nazi salute, yelling "Heil Trump" to onlookers.
Scuffles with counter-demonstrators had ended by the time a young man with known far-right affiliations drove into a crowd of those counter-demonstrators, killing a woman.
In his statement on Saturday, the President failed to address the overt racism of the event, and drew a false equivalency between the opposing groups, decrying the violence "on many sides."
He called upon Americans to "cherish our history". This was rightly read as a sympathetic signal to those who supported the Confederate monuments. "No condemnation at all," wrote the co-founder of one neo-Nazi website. "Really, really good. God bless him."
On Sunday Trump ignored calls from across the political spectrum to condemn the racist groups. Instead he appeared on Fox News and told hosts he was considering pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio, an ally of Trump's whose office the US Justice Department found to be guilty of the worst pattern of racial profiling in American history, and who had been found guilty of contempt of court for refusing to end his practice of "immigration round-ups".
Finally on Monday Trump made a statement in which he first celebrated his economic achievements, before adding: "Racism is evil, 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."
By then Ken Frazier, the African American chief executive of one of America's largest pharmaceutical companies, had resigned his post on a White House advisory board in protest.
We should perhaps not be surprised that Trump is a reluctant critic of the far right. He led the racist "birther" conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not an American. He launched his campaign declaring that Mexicans were rapists and that he would build a wall to keep them out. For a long time he refused to disavow the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who attended the rally in Charlottesville on Saturday, telling media it was "fulfilling the promise" of the Trump presidency.
Trump attracted to his fold Steve Bannon, who ran a news organisation, Breitbart, which he declared a platform of the "alt-right" movement, under whose umbrella many of the groups that gathered in Charlottesville stand. Bannon remains Trump's chief adviser, a fact that only fuels support for Trump in the alt-right movement.
But support for Trump is plummeting more broadly. The most recent Gallop poll shows he has an approval rating of just 34 per cent, a historic low for a president so early in his first term during a time of relative peace and prosperity.
This is a dangerous situation for the United States and for the world, because Trump appears to be determined to shape his rhetoric for a shrinking audience of die-hard supporters to the exclusion not only of minorities and opponents, but even of more moderate Republicans, especially those in Congress.
In this unstable environment, America now confronts the absurd possibility of a government shutdown and a default on US debt in the coming weeks, despite the Republican Party's full control of government.
Worse, this needless strife comes as Trump must seek to secure and promote peace on the Korean peninsula, a difficult task he so far appears to be both ill-equipped for and uninterested in.
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