If I could pick a moment in time that could be replayed in our current days, it would without a doubt be Kanye West's "George Bush doesn't care about black people" moment from 2005, post-Hurricane Katrina. For this edition, I would replace George Bush with Donald Trump, but it's not just black people he doesn't seem to care about—it's anybody but the alt-right.
To recap a truly horrendous few days, an act of domestic terrorism took place in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend. What started as white supremacy intimidation tactics unsurprisingly spiraled into full-out brawls between counter-protesters and alt-righters and neo-Nazis, who descended on Charlottesville for a Unite the Right rally on Saturday. A nut job took it upon himself to drive a vehicle into a crowd of people near the rally, resulting in one death and dozens of injuries. Because he's the president of the United States of America, many were waiting for Trump to address the situation.
In his initial response to the unrest, Trump said there was violence "on many sides," instead of focusing his condemnation on the alt-right organizers and attendees. On Monday, he finally called the antagonizers by their names.
"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," Trump said. But right after making this statement, Trump retweeted a known alt-right agitator, who played perhaps the most obvious card in the deck in response to the attention on Charlottesville.
Meanwhile: 39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that? https://t.co/9Crutnnrp8
Whether Trump is aware of Posobiec's alt-right connections is, of course, a mystery, but it speaks volumes that he would choose to focus on the violence of Chicago, which he's obsessed with, instead of calming Americans by further addressing his plans to combat racism and white nationalist violence. I'd say I was disappointed, but it would just be a waste of time. Same Trump, different day.
