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For many Trump supporters, the president’s comments about the violence in Charlottesville were the last straw, making it difficult to continue to support him. Over several days, Trump seemed to seesaw back and forth about the violence.
It began with his comment from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, when he said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” He repeated, “On many sides.”
Moments after he gave this statement, an ABC News reporter shouted a question, asking if Trump wants the support of white nationalist groups, many of whom say they support him, and whether he feels he has denounced them strongly enough. Trump did not answer nor take any other questions from reporters.
Shortly after the president gave his statement, a White House official on background said: “The president was condemning hatred, bigotry, and violence from all sources and all sides. There was violence between protesters and counterprotesters today.”
The following morning, a White House spokesperson who would not be publicly identified released a statement about Trump’s comments.
“The president said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred, and of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazi, and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans together.”
The next day at roughly 12:40 p.m., Trump made a televised statement at the White House. “Racism is evil,” he said. “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.”
The following day, during a press conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan, Trump lashed out at criticism of his initial statement. Asked about his immediate response, Trump quickly went on to blame both sides of protesters for the conflict, adding that there were “very fine people” in both the group of white supremacists and white nationalists as well as among the counterprotesters.
“I think there is blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump insisted. “You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides,” he added.
Finally, during a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump spent about twenty minutes going over his various statements about Charlottesville, omitting some of the most divisive comments and repeatedly criticizing the media for the portrayal of his statements, including how he said that there were “very fine” people on both sides of the violent rally.
“I said everything. I hit them with neo-Nazi. I hit them with everything. I got the white supremacists, the neo-Nazi. I got them all in there. Let’s see. KKK, we have KKK. I got them all,” Trump said.
Like many of Trump’s more controversial comments, what he said was literally true: Given that some of the demonstrators were not Nazis and were simply against tearing down a Confederate statue, there were indeed decent people on both sides, as Trump said. Moreover, as a general proposition, both the extreme left and the extreme right engage in violence. But what Trump failed to see was the broader impression he conveyed.
“If you cross the street when there’s a red light, and you get hit by a car, the first thing that people who run to the emergency room to see you don’t generally say is, ‘Well, it’s kind of your fault.’ They say, ‘How are you? I hope you’re okay.’ ” a Trump aide said. “And I think what happened was the president came out and said, ‘Well, you know, they kind of were to blame,’ meaning both sides shared responsibility for whatever happened. Okay, that may be true, but that’s not exactly what people want to hear at that time. It just was not the right moment to have that explained.”
Following Trump’s remarks, twenty-one charities, including the International Red Cross Ball that Trump and his wife had attended for years, pulled out of holding fund-raisers at Mar-a-Lago. However, other groups immediately jumped into the breach. Mar-a-Lago’s roster for the new season was packed with events, ranging from charities holding their first-ever fund-raisers there to private parties hosted by club members, including a seven-hundred-guest wedding. Billionaires were begging to join the club, but only a limited number of memberships open up each year.
But Trump again sabotaged his own agenda when, in an Oval Office meeting with legislators, he was pushing for an immigration system based on merit. As part of a bipartisan immigration deal, the issue of special protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries came up.
“Why are we having all these people from sh——hole countries come here?” Trump allegedly said, according to some who were present. Others in the meeting heard “sh——house,” allowing some participants in the meeting, like Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, to say she did not recall the president “using that exact phrase.”
Trump then suggested that the United States instead bring in more people from countries such as Norway. He also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that immigrants from those countries would contribute to the United States economically. Trump went on to single out Haiti, saying, “Why do we need more Haitians?”
The next day, after attending a White House ceremony to honor Martin Luther King Jr., Isaac Newton Farris Jr., the civil rights leader’s nephew, told CNN, “I don’t think President Trump is a racist in the traditional sense as we know in this country. I think President Trump is racially ignorant and racially uninformed. But I don’t think he is a racist in the traditional sense.”
Trump’s thoughtless comment brings to mind Lyndon Johnson. A champion of African-Americans, Johnson marshaled support from southern Democrats for his groundbreaking civil rights legislation. But his hypocrisy extended to regularly referring to blacks as “niggers.” On Air Force One, Johnson was discussing his proposed civil rights bill with two governors. Explaining why it was so important to him, Johnson said it was simple: “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for 200 years,” Robert M. MacMillan, an Air Force One steward, told me.
Bannon told me he urged Trump on in the middle of the Charlottesville controversy, but within a week of that, he was gone. Bannon had never enjoyed working in the White House. He saw it as similar to his days in the Navy. A nondrinker, he had no use for White House parties or other perks that go with the job. As soon as Bannon arrived at the White House on Inauguration Day, he realized that he would not be long for the job. He felt that Trump had treated him as a peer during the presidential campaign, but he often complained to friends that when he joined the White House, “all of a sudden I was just a staffer.”
Trump, meanwhile, complained publicly and privately that Bannon was taking too much credit for his help on the campaign. Trump told aides he was “annoyed” by Time magazine’s cover story that included a photo of Bannon.
Focusing on Bannon’s influence in the White House, the cover story asked, “Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?”
“That doesn’t just happen,” Trump told a visitor, a phrase he frequently uses to express anger about subordinates who put their interests ahead of his.
Bannon’s portrayal as Trump’s puppet master by Saturday Night Live further infuriated a boss sharply attuned to his media image and allergic to sharing the stage, especially with someone said to be controlling him.
Soon after the Time cover was published, Trump, encouraged by Jared Kushner, humiliated Bannon by stripping him of his position on the National Security Council, cutting him out of key meetings, and declining to voice his faith in him. Trump pointedly told the Wall Street Journal that Bannon was just “a guy who works for me.” He later added that he was his own strategist.
Trump had also been upset about Bannon’s participation in a book by Bloomberg News reporter Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain. In particular, the jacket displaying a shared photo billing between Trump and his chief strategist did not sit well.
With John Kelly as chief of staff, when his job security was more precarious than ever, Bannon further imperiled his own standing by giving an interview to the liberal American Prospect magazine, in which he sniped by name at his enemies within the White House, including Gary Cohn, the National Economic Council director. He also publicly contradicted the administration’s stance on North Korea, saying there was no military solution to the regime’s race to develop missiles that could hit the U.S. mainland with nuclear weapons. That infuriated Kelly, who was outraged by the lack of discretion that Bannon displayed in the interview.
When Kelly arranged for his resignation, Bannon was ready to go and head Breitbart News again as executive chairman. After being dismissed from his White House job, Bannon self-importantly called it the end of an era—for the country, not just his career.
“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” he said.
As with other former aides, Trump continued to call him. Bannon told Charlie Rose on CBS’s 60 Minutes that firing James Comey as FBI director was the biggest mistake in “modern political history.” If Comey had not been fired, former FBI director Robert Mueller would not have been appointed special counsel and would not be leading his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Bannon said.
After the September 10, 2017, show, Trump called Bannon, who was in Asia, and congratulated him.
“He starts off by saying, ‘You’re such a piece of work,’ ” Bannon says. “We just start talking about Charlie Rose, and he starts talking about all the guys attacking him. He was on a roll.”
As for Bannon’s criticism of him for firing Comey, Trump did not mention it, Bannon says. “I told that to the president to his face on many occasions,” Bannon says.
However, after Michael Wolff’s book quoted Bannon calling Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer during the campaign “treasonous,” Trump denounced him, saying, “When Bannon was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” Soon, Bannon was gone from Breitbart. In his book Fire and Fury, Wolff claims he interviewed Trump, but Communications Director Hope Hicks told me Trump spoke to Wolff “about something unrelated in February [2017], and Michael is characterizing it as an interview for the book.”
Even though Wolff writes for liberal publications such as Vanity Fair, Bannon pushed Wolff’s book project, and the White House went along. Contrary to his claims, Wolff was not allowed to roam freely in the West Wing but operated like any other reporter with a White House hard pass.
Wolff’s book claims that Bannon saw Trump’s comments about the Charlottesville violence as a sign that he is mentally unfit for office and could be removed under the provisions of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. But I was interviewing Bannon for this book in the middle of the Charlottesville controversy. Our interview took place in Bannon’s temporary office in the Eisenhower Executive Office when the White House was being renovated.
Contrary to Wolff’s portrayal, Bannon was gleeful about the president’s comments. He told me he spoke with Trump twice by phone as the backlash over his comments erupted and had urged him on. He said he told Trump that if he retracted or modified anything he had said, the press would only attack him for not being vehement enough and saying too little, too late. Thus, instead of being horrified by Trump’s comments, he told me he was congratulating him.
Wolff’s book is riddled with false claims, many obviously so: that Melania did not want Trump to run for president or to win, that he did not want to win and assured her he would not win, that he looked like a ghost when he did win, that she cried when he won and when he was inaugurated, that Trump and Melania have separate bedrooms, that he wanted a lock on his bedroom but the Secret Service objected, that Trump spends little time with Melania and barely knows Barron, that he goes to McDonald’s because he fears he will be poisoned and eats McDonald’s hamburgers in bed, that his memory is so impaired that he failed to recognize a succession of old friends at Mar-a-Lago, that he doesn’t read, that he did not know who former House Speaker John Boehner was, and that a hundred percent of his staff—including Ivanka and Jared—question his intelligence and fitness for office.
But after a three-hour physical exam, Dr. Ronny Jackson, the White House doctor, pronounced Trump at seventy-one mentally and physically fit for office, having achieved a perfect score on the cognitive test. Dr. Jackson said Trump agreed to work on plans to improve his diet and to introduce physical exercise to his routine. Wolff actually conducted many of his White House interviews without recording or taking notes. The fact that most of the mainstream media took such a book seriously is a testament to how far journalistic standards have sunk.
If Trump undercut his own support with ambiguous remarks about the violence in Charlottesville, he more than made up for it by condemning professional football players who make tens of millions of dollars a year and yet cannot bring themselves to honor the country by standing for the national anthem.
The flap began when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick started protesting by taking a knee—football terminology for when the quarterback puts a knee to the ground to signal the end of a play—instead of standing while the national anthem was being played before the start of games. Kaepernick saw his gesture as a way to point to what he viewed as the oppression of people of color in the United States. During practice sessions, the quarterback wore socks that depicted policemen as cartoon pigs.
Kaepernick was first noticed sitting down during the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 49er’s third preseason game in August 2016. In a postgame interview, he explained his position, saying, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder,” referring to allegations of improper shooting of black men by police officers. Never mind that according to a Washington Post analysis, police fatally shot twice as many whites as blacks in 2017. For good measure, Kaepernick threw in references to slavery.
Kaepernick’s protest set off a wave of similar demonstrations by professional athletes, most of them black, and a national debate about the very nature of America. Meanwhile, the football player opted out of his contract after he played poorly for two seasons. He then complained he was being discriminated against because no one wanted to hire him.
In September 2017, Trump sent out multiple tweets saying that National Football League players should be either fired or suspended if they fail to stand for the national anthem. In response, many NFL owners and players came together to protest Trump’s position. The protest movement morphed into a condemnation of Trump. The players knelt, locked arms, or even remained in the locker room as the anthem was played. Trump fueled the controversy by praising National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) drivers who stood for the anthem.
The California chapter of the NAACP supported Kaepernick’s protest and called for the removal of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem on the grounds it is racist. The chapter’s beef was with the third stanza, which is rarely sung, because it mentions slaves: “Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” Based on that tortured reasoning, Congress should adopt a new national anthem that is not “another song that disenfranchises part of the American population,” said California NAACP president Alice Huffman.
No other president would have called out a black man over his disrespect for a symbol of America. When no team wanted to hire Kaepernick, TV pundits claimed his First Amendment rights were being violated, forgetting that as employees themselves, they would be fired on the spot for kneeling on air while the national anthem was being played or to demonstrate support for any cause.
Trump’s new chief of staff John Kelly waded into the national anthem controversy, telling other aides he fully supported the president’s position that NFL players should be suspended or fired if they refuse to stand for the national anthem.
“Every American should take the three minutes or so that it takes for the national anthem to play to stand up, remove their hat, put their hand over their heart, and think about the men and women that have been named, sacrificing their lives, so that song can be played in the stadium,” Kelly said in a statement released by the White House.
Meanwhile, attendance at games slumped, and NFL TV audiences declined by 9 percent over the previous season because most fans watch the games for entertainment, not to see disrespect for a symbol of America. During the same period, television viewership of National Basketball Association games increased by 15 percent.
The media saw Trump’s moves as a cynical way to appeal to white working-class supporters. While it had that effect, the fact is that Trump has always been deeply patriotic and respectful of the symbols that define America. Indeed, if you want to know what Donald Trump is all about, drive past his Mar-a-Lago home and club on South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach.
Fluttering over the landscape is a massive American flag visible in all directions. When Trump had it erected in 2006, the flag was closer to the street and mounted on a much taller flag pole. Then the town of Palm Beach claimed the flag’s height exceeded zoning regulations and began fining Trump $1,250 a day unless he removed it.
Trump sued for twenty-five million dollars, claiming his First Amendment rights were being violated. In 2007, Trump and the town settled. Trump agreed to mount the flag on a shorter flagpole. Instead of paying the fine that by then totaled $120,000, Trump agreed to donate $100,000 to Iraq War veterans’ charities or the local VA hospital.
As he is glad to tell you, Trump usually wins in the end. He moved the flag to ground that he had his workers elevate, so now it towers over the landscape as much as before.
Tony Senecal, Trump’s former butler at Mar-a-Lago, attributes the Mar-a-Lago spat to Trump’s patriotism. “You know Donald Trump was born on Flag Day, and I swear it’s in his blood,” Senecal says, referring to Trump’s June 14, 1946, birth. “He really is red, white, and blue.”