I DON'T BELIEVE YOU, YOU'RE NOT THE TRUTH

I DON’T BELIEVE YOU, YOU’RE NOT THE TRUTH: “Best regards to all those injured in Charlottesville.” That was Donald Trump’s message to the victims (and presumably the perpetrators as well, because all lives matter) of the Nazi terror attack on Saturday. Regards? A strange thing to say, impersonal and hollow.

Trump’s weasel words sparked innumerable demands for him to do better. The unusual thing about these demands is that many of them came from conservatives. But on Saturday, Donald Trump said what he meant, and meant what he said.

It took two full days for his staff to convince him that his initial response was a public relations disaster. This morning, they dragged him out for an unscheduled speech in which he reluctantly read a few lines critical of white nationalists from a teleprompter – but only after patting himself on the back at great length on the performance of the American economy.

No doubt some Beltway pundits will gush over how “presidential” the speech was. But the Nazis and the Klan can read between the lines. They know where his sympathies lie. Their leaders – Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller – remain in the White House, and with Robert Mueller closing in, Trump’s base is all he has left. As long as he can keep congressional Republicans afraid of “the base” (and especially the Nazi fanboys who function as the movement’s shock troops), he can hope that most of them will resist calls to bring him to justice.

Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald noted another factor in Trump’s reluctance to criticize his Nazi and Klan supporters: “He has daddy issues. And he would never speak against his dad, the white supremacist.”

Contemporary newspaper accounts are a bit skechy, but it is a matter of record that on Memorial Day, 1927, a thousand robed and hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan busted up a NYPD parade in Queens. Yes, you read that right. The Klan attacked a parade of policemen.

Why? A lot of the cops were Irish or Italian Catholics, and the Klan hates Catholics. Seven Klansmen were arrested. One of the seven was Fred C. Trump, the father of our 45th President. Like father, like son?

Ultimately, though, the origin of Trump’s affinity for racists is less important that the fact that it’s a part of his makeup. He’s 71 years old. At that age (and I say this as a 70 year old), the habits you’ve cultivated all your life rise to the surface. They become who you are. And Trump is obviously suffering from dementia of some sort. If he changes at all, he’ll change for the worse.