False moral equivalency is not a bug of Trumpism. It’s a feature.

The following articke by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website August 16, 2017:

THE BIG IDEA: President Trump has a troubling tendency to blame “both sides.”

Showing that the remarks he delivered from a White House teleprompter on Monday were hollow and insincere, Trump yesterday revived his initial claim that “both sides” are to blame for the horrific violence at a white supremacist rally over the weekend in Charlottesville.

Going rogue during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to be about infrastructure, the president said there are “two sides to a story.” He then attacked counterprotesters for acting “very, very violently” as they came “with clubs in their hand” at the neo-Nazis and KKK members who were protesting the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that,” Trump said. “Do they have any semblance of guilt? Do they have any problem? I think they do!”

The president then complained that not everyone who came to the “Unite the Right” rally was a neo-Nazi or white nationalist. “And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly,” a testy Trump said during a combative back-and-forth with reporters. (Read the full transcript here.)

These comments suggest very strongly that the president of the United States sees moral equivalence between Nazis and those who oppose Nazis. Objectively, of course, there is NO moral equivalence between Nazis and those who oppose Nazis.

But this is part of a pattern.

Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)

In a pre-Super Bowl interview on Fox, Bill O’Reilly pressed Trump on why he respected Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Putin’s a killer,” O’Reilly said, noting that he murders his political enemies and leads a repressive authoritarian regime. Trump replied without hesitation, “We got a lot of killers. What? You think our country’s so innocent?”

“Take a look at what we’ve done, too,” the president continued. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes. … So, lot of killers around, believe me.”

Trump made similarly bizarre statements about the moral equivalence between the democratic United States and autocratic Russia as a candidate.

As William F. Buckley, the founding editor of National Review, once put it: “To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.”

Yet that’s essentially the logic Trump used yesterday.

Don’t forget: Trump compared the U.S. intelligence community to the Nazi regime earlier this year.

And the president’s first White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, used another variant of false moral equivalency when he made the insane claim that, unlike Bashar al-Assad, Adolph Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” during World War II. He apologized the next day. “Frankly, I mistakenly made an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which there is no comparison,” Spicer said.

Trump reaches into his suit jacket to read a quote from his Saturday statement during his press conference yesterday. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press)

— Trump has often defended his own immoral behavior on the grounds that other men also behave badly, as if that somehow exonerates him. Recall how defiant he was last October after The Post published a video of him boasting in extremely lewd and predatory terms to “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush about being able to get away with groping women and propositioning other men’s wives because he is a celebrity.

“Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course – not even close,” Trump said in his initial statement. “This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago.”

In a subsequent statement, he pivoted to argue that what he did was not as bad as what the Clintons had done in the past: “I’ve said some foolish things, but there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary (Clinton) has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”

The GOP nominee for president then brought women who had accused the former president of sexual misconduct as his guests to the debate in St. Louis that weekend. It was part of a broader effort to make the case, for all intents and purposes, that a lot of men are boorish pigs. Muddying the waters, as irrelevant as it might have been to questions about Trump’s personal character, allowed his campaign to survive.

That scorched-earth strategy is consistent with Trump’s response to Charlottesville.

President Reagan addresses the nation on television in 1983 to make the case for a proposed defense budget. At left is a picture of Soviet Migs in western Cuba. (Dennis Cook/Associated Press)

— One of the many ironies in all this is that conservatives have spent decades accusing liberals of believing in the kind of both-sides-ism that Trump now routinely espouses.

In one of his most famous speeches, Ronald Reagan told the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983: “I urge you to beware the temptation of … blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay on “The Myth of Moral Equivalence” is a classic of this genre. Reagan’s former ambassador to the United Nations pilloried those who argued that NATO was no better than the Warsaw Pact.

It has never gotten sufficient attention, but the year Kirkpatrick published her piece, Trump was paying to run full-page ads in The Washington Post attacking Reagan and his administration for lacking “backbone” in the realm of foreign policy. Talk about being on the wrong side of history…

The right’s disdain for both sides-ism continued through the Obama era. In 2011, Paul Ryan told the The Weekly Standard: “If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics—I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism.”

Three controversies stemming from Trump’s rhetoric on race

— “The president’s rhetorical ricochet … seemed almost perfectly designed to highlight some basic truths about Donald Trump,” observes Marc Fisher, who co-authored The Post’s “Trump Revealed” biography last year. “He does not like to be told what to say. He will always find a way to pull the conversation back to himself. And he is preternaturally inclined to dance with the ones who brought him… Trump said Tuesday that Saturday’s confrontation ‘was a horrible day.’ And he made clear again that ‘the driver of the car’ that plowed into pedestrians in Charlottesville ‘is a disgrace to himself, his family and this country.’ But then the president turned to one of his favorite rhetorical tools, using casual language to strip away any definite blame, any clear moral stand, and instead send the message that nothing is certain, that everything is negotiable, that ethics are always situational. ‘You can call it terrorism,’ he said. ‘You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want.’”

We’ve become sort of numb to Trump’s rhetoric since he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower 26 months ago and declared that Mexican immigrants are rapists, but we cannot lose perspective of just how shocking it is that an American president said what he did yesterday. This is one of the most surreal moments of Trump’s surreal presidency.

HOW IT’S PLAYING:

— A top-ranking official in Angela Merkel’s government slammed Trump’s comments in a press release that went out this morning. From Reuters: “German Justice Minister Heiko Maas on Wednesday condemned (Trump’s) latest comments … ‘It is unbearable how Trump is now glossing over the violence of the right-wing hordes from Charlottesville,’ Maas said … reflecting concern across the German political spectrum about the Trump presidency.”

— The mainstream media’s coverage is brutal:

• Washington Post A1: “Trump appeared far more passionate in defending many of the rally participants than he had in his more muted denunciation of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis a day earlier at the White House.”
• The Post’s Editorial Board: “The nation can only weep. … That car in Charlottesville did not kill or wound just the 20 bodies it struck. It damaged the nation. Mr. Trump not only failed to help the country heal; he made the wound wider and deeper.”
• Philip Bump: “Trump puts a fine point on it: He sides with the alt-right in Charlottesville.”
• David Weigel: “If some Republican candidate for state representative gave that press conference, the party would take him off the ballot.”
• Dana Milbank: “Trump just hit a new low. … It was downright ugly. … The nationalist-turned-presidential-adviser Stephen K. Bannon used to say that the publishing outfit he led, Breitbart, was a ‘platform for the alt-right,’ a euphemism for white nationalists and related far-right extremists. But now there is a new platform for the alt-right in America: the White House. It looks more and more like the White Nationalist House. … Trump, who this week retweeted an ‘alt-right’ conspiracy theorist and ally of white supremacists, continues to employ in his White House not just Bannon and Stephen Miller, two darlings of the alt-right, but also Sebastian Gorka, who uses the platform to defend the embattled white man.”
• New York Times A1: “[Trump] buoyed the white nationalist movement on Tuesday as no president has done in generations … Never has he gone as far in defending their actions as he did during a wild, street-corner shouting match of a news conference in the gilded lobby of Trump Tower, angrily asserting that so-called alt-left activists were just as responsible for the bloody confrontation as marchers brandishing swastikas, Confederate battle flags, anti-Semitic banners and ‘Trump/Pence’ signs.”
• USA Today: “Former KKK leader David Duke praises Trump for his ‘courage.’”
• Associated Press: “Racial politics haunt GOP in the Trump era.”
• Wall Street Journal: “With New Remarks on Charlottesville, Trump Leaves Himself Isolated.”
• Los Angeles Times: “Trump provokes new furor by giving foes of white supremacists equal blame.”
• The Daily Beast: “For a White House that has careened from crisis point to crisis point, Trump’s performance on Tuesday was a uniquely chaotic crescendo. He had gathered the press to talk about infrastructure regulations only to find himself defending a portion of the white supremacists who had marched with tiki-torches on Friday while shouting anti-Semitic epithets. Trump often can serve as his own worst enemy. One White House official conceded … that Tuesday’s presser was a continuation of a pattern that the president follows, in which he will ‘extend the shelf life’ of a controversy because he somehow cannot help himself from talking about it. … ‘It was the president’s decision to do this,’ another White House official (said) of Trump’s free-wheeling at the press conference. Asked for a mini-review of Trump’s press conference performance, the official would only respond, ‘clean-up on aisle Trump.’”
• CNBC’s John Harwood: “The president does not share the instinctive moral revulsion most Americans feel toward white supremacists and neo-Nazis. And he feels contempt for those — like the executives — who are motivated to express that revulsion at his expense. … Trump has displayed this character trait repeatedly. It combines indifference to conventional notions of morality or propriety with disbelief that others would be motivated by them. He dismissed suggestions that it was inappropriate for his son and campaign manager to have met with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. … ‘Most people would have taken the meeting,’ he said. He called it ‘extremely unfair’ that Jeff Sessions recused himself from [the Russia investigation] after the attorney general concluded that the law required him to do so. ‘In a president, character is everything,’ Republican commentator Peggy Noonan has written. ‘You can’t buy courage and decency. You can’t rent a strong moral sense. A president must bring those things with him.’ Trump has brought other values, as today’s news conference again made clear.”
• CNN’s Chris Cillizza: “Trump’s comments … not only revealed, again, his remarkable blindness to the racial history and realities of this country, but also showed his willingness to stake out morally indefensible positions as the result of personal pique. … What Trump is doing is dangerous — for our politics and for our moral fiber. To condone white supremacists by insisting there are two sides to every coin is to take us back decades in our understanding of each other. … To do so purposely to score political points or stick it in the eye of your supposed media enemies is, frankly, despicable.”
• The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza: “Firing Steve Bannon Won’t Change Donald Trump. … If Trump finally pushes Bannon out of the White House, the nationalist policy project will be all but dead. … Trump himself has always been more animated by the xenophobia of Bannonism than by its populist economic views. A Trump White House without Bannon will be no more radical in its coddling of far-right groups—today, Trump showed again that he needs no encouragement—but it will be more captured by the traditional small-government agenda of the G.O.P. that Bannon hoped to destroy.”

— Television news hosts reacted viscerally in real time at the end of Trump’s 23-minute presser:

• Chuck Todd on MSNBC: “What I just saw gave me the wrong kind of chills. Honestly, I’m a bit shaken by what I just heard.”
• Kat Timpf on Fox News: “I’m still in the phase where I’m wondering if it was actually real life. I have too much eye makeup on to start crying right now.”
• Her co-anchor Guy Benson in the 5 p.m. hour added that Trump “lost me” when he said some “very fine people” participated in the white supremacist rally: “They were chanting things like, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ There’s nothing good about that.”
• Jake Tapper on CNN: “Wow, that was something else.”

— Responsible conservative thought leaders were aghast: 

• Post columnist Charles Krauthammer declared on Fox last night: “What Trump did today was a moral disgrace.”
• National Review’s David French argues that Trump gave the alt-right its “greatest media moment ever”: “To understand the significance of Trump’s words, you have to understand a bit about the alt-right. While its members certainly march with Nazis and make common cause with neo-Confederates, it views itself as something different. They’re the ‘intellectual’ adherents to white identity politics. They believe their movement is substantially different and more serious than the Klansmen of days past. When Trump carves them away from the Nazis and distinguishes them from the neo-Confederates, he’s doing exactly what they want. He’s making them respectable. He’s making them different. But ‘very fine people’ don’t march with tiki torches chanting ‘blood and soil’ or ‘Jews will not replace us.’”
• Commentary Magazine Editor John Podhoretz tweeted: “There were not ‘very fine people on both sides’ in Charlottesville. No one on the Nazi side was fine. Every one of them is a monster.”

— Multiple right-wing news sites deleted articles from January that encouraged readers to drive into protesters: “Originally published by The Daily Caller and later syndicated or aggregated by several other websites, including Fox Nation, an offshoot of Fox News’ website, it carried an unsubtle headline: ‘Here’s A Reel Of Cars Plowing Through Protesters Trying To Block The Road.’ Embedded in the article was a minute-and-a-half long video showing one vehicle after another driving through demonstrations,” CNN reports. “The footage was set to a cover of Ludacris’ ‘Move B****.’ … The article … drew renewed attention on Tuesday following this weekend’s deadly incident in Charlottesville. As the outrage grew on Twitter, Fox News took action, deleting the version Fox Nation had published.”

— Did Trump get his George Washington and Thomas Jefferson line from Fox News? “The night before the president’s press conference, Fox’s Martha MacCallum and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich discussed the same thing,” BuzzFeed notes.

— Doubling down: The White House press office last night distributed these suggested talking points to friendly surrogates: “The President was entirely correct— both sides of the violence in Charlottesville acted inappropriately, and bear some responsibility. … We should not overlook the facts just because the media finds them inconvenient: From cop killing and violence at political rallies, to shooting at Congressmen at a practice baseball game, extremists on the left have engaged in terrible acts of violence.” (The Atlantic’s Molly Ball posted the full document.)

Jimmy Kimmel’s Plan to Save Us from Trump

— Late-night hosts didn’t just have a field day. They felt obligated to also take a more somber approach to Trump’s comments.

Dispensing with his usual monologue jokes, Jimmy Kimmel offered a serious, 12-minute plea to Trump’s voters on ABC last night: “Every day there’s something nuts. But you’ve been trying to ignore it because you don’t want to admit to these smug, annoying liberals that they were right. That’s the last thing you want to do. But the truth is deep down inside you know you made a mistake. You know you picked the wrong guy. And it isn’t getting better. It’s getting worse. … Well, now he does need to go. So it’s time for especially you who voted for him to tell him to go. Please. Think about it.” (Emily Yahr)

Stephen Colbert – Days Later Trump still Blames ” Both Sides ” | August 15, 2017

— Stephen Colbert on CBS mocked Trump’s claim that the reason he waited two days to properly respond to the violence was because he needed all the facts first. “I wait for the facts, okay?” Colbert said in his Trump voice. “Just ask the millions of illegal voters who refused to look for Obama’s birth certificate during my record breaking inauguration, okay? It’s all on the Obama wiretaps.”

Breaking Crazy: Donald Trump’s Charlottesville Press Conference

— “President Trump this afternoon gave a press conference that can only be described as clinically insane,” Seth Meyers said on NBC. Later in the show, Meyers recognized some of the unsung heroes from Charlottesville – including an African American Virginia state trooper who tried to keep the peace. (Watch here.)

Donald Trump greets Paul Ryan in May. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

— Top Republicans quickly distanced themselves from the president’s comments:

• Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.): “We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.”
• Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla), who battled Trump in the 2016 primaries, went on a tweetstorm: “The organizers of events which inspired & led to #charlottesvilleterroristattack are 100% to blame for a number of reasons. They are adherents of an evil ideology which argues certain people are inferior because of race, ethnicity or nation of origin. … These groups today use SAME symbols & same arguments of #Nazi & #KKK, groups responsible for some of worst crimes against humanity ever. Mr. President, you can’t allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame. They support idea which cost nation & world so much pain. The #WhiteSupremacy groups will see being assigned only 50% of blame as a win. We cannot allow this old evil to be resurrected.”
• Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee: “I don’t understand what’s so hard about this. White supremacists and Neo-Nazis are evil and shouldn’t be defended.”
• Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.): “Apologize. Racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism, of any form is unacceptable. And the leader of the free world should be unambiguous about that.”
• Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio): “Let’s get real. There is no moral equivalency to Nazi sympathizers. There can be no room in America — or the Republican party — for racism, anti-Semitism, hate or white nationalism. Period.”
• Mitt Romney: “No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.”

— But, but, but: Actions will speak louder than words. And GOP congressional leaders are not rushing to hold hearings on the resurgence of white supremacy. So far, they are ignoring the pleas of Democrats. Politico’s Kyle Cheney and Rachael Bade report: “[T]he House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Department of Justice’s handling of domestic terrorism, has no immediate plans to schedule one, aides say. The House Homeland Security Committee is lumping the issue into an annual ‘global threats’ hearing scheduled sometime in September. … Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has no plans to call for one focused on the events in Charlottesville. GOP leaders, meanwhile, aren’t leaning on their allies to hold public sessions or launch inquiries. … GOP sources suggested it might be too early to tell whether Congress should get involved. And some question what tangible action Congress could take to help the situation, aside from calling public attention to the issue through hearings.”

Brian Schatz in his office. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)