Trump Blamed the Violence in Charlottesville ‘On Many Sides.’ Republicans Must Reject That.
Republicans once recognized the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil. The party’s great moral champion in the moment when it became the political tribune for a wave of 19th-century abolitionist sentiment, Pennsylvania Senator Thaddeus Stevens, argued that: “I can never acknowledge the right of slavery. I will bow down to no deity however worshipped by professing Christians — however dignified by the name of the Goddess of Liberty, whose footstool is the crushed necks of the groaning millions, and who rejoices in the resoundings of the tyrant’s lash, and the cries of his tortured victims.”
That is the language that Republicans used to speak.
But Americans are not hearing any echoes of that language in the awful response of Donald Trump to the racist terror that has rocked Charlottesville, Virginia.
When white nationalists marched with the flag of the slaveholders that Stevens and his comrades vanquished more than a century and a half ago, when these so-called “neo-Confederates” unleashed hatred and violence in Charlottesville, the Republican president of the United States attempted to equate their imfamy with the principled resistance to racism and xenophobia.
More: Trump Blamed the Violence in Charlottesville ‘On Many Sides.’ Republicans Must Reject That.