This coming Sunday, August 12, is the one year anniversary of the main bulk of the deadly white supremacist-driven riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, that ended with one counter protester dead, a number of others injured, and two police officers dead as well. On Saturday, President Donald Trump finally got around to condemning racists, doing so ahead of another major white supremacist rally planned for D.C. on Sunday.
He wrote on Twitter:
‘The riots in Charlottesville a year ago resulted in senseless death and division. We must come together as a nation. I condemn all types of racism and acts of violence. Peace to ALL Americans!’
To be sure, Trump has, technically, offered similar denunciations of racism in the past. On August 14, 2017, he made a show of condemning white nationalism, telling those gathered before him in the White House:
‘Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs.’
That comment sounds nice, sure, but it and the president’s other occasional similar denunciations of similar sentiments drown under the weight of his repeated promotion of acceptance for racism and racists.
Both before and after his above quoted post-Charlottesville comment, Trump asserted that blame for the violence rested with both sides, refusing to single out white nationalists for condemnation, despite the fact that it’s not even as though it was a counterprotester who drove their car into a crowd.
More recently, Trump has carried on with peddling his own racism. Besides his infamous assertion that a wall along the U.S. border wall with Mexico is needed, he claimed while in Europe recently that immigration poses a “threat” to the continent and by extension the entirety of Western civilization.
There’s no getting around the fact that such is racist. No one single tweet makes the entire burden of Trump’s acceptance of racism and racists go away.
Check out Twitter’s response below.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot