Donald Trump, Republican president of the United States, meet Larry Hogan, Republican governor of Maryland. And while we’re at it, say hello to Catherine Pugh, Democratic mayor of Baltimore.
Trump wants us to distinguish between the racist and Jew-hating bigots who marched recently in Charlottesville, Va., and the “fine people” among them who were merely trying to protect the statue of that great man, Robert E. Lee.
Yeah, Lee, that great man who led the Confederate war to tear apart the nation.
Gov. Hogan said, Enough of this fine-tuning of history. This week, he called for removing that odious statue of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney which stands just outside the State House in Annapolis.
Yeah, Taney, that great man who wrote the landmark 1857 Dred Scott decision upholding slavery.
Mayor Pugh said, Enough of this “studying” business of Confederate statues that has gone on at Baltimore City Hall for two years, ever since the mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, S.C.
So on Tuesday night, minus fanfare or protest or equivocating over politics, city work crews removed statues of Lee and fellow Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, as well as Justice Taney and Confederate soldiers and sailors. Because history has long since judged them all to be traitors to their country and not heroes worthy of enshrinement.
President Trump soils the office of the presidency – and soils his country – by failing to make such easy distinctions, and further soils himself by attempting to equate the neo-Nazis and KKK neanderthals with those who stood up to their bigoted and dangerous weekend actions in Virginia.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at … the, as you say, the alt-right?” Trump asked reporters on Tuesday. “Do they have any semblance of guilt? Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”
And with those words, this president willfully – willfully – changed the subject.
Was there violence on both sides? Probably. And heartbreakingly so.
But the argument isn’t about tactics. It’s about morality. One side was saying America doesn’t welcome African-Americans or Jewish Americans; it only welcomes white Christian Americans. The other side was saying such talk is itself un-American.
One side was saying the lynching of blacks didn’t go far enough, and the murder of six million Jews didn’t go far enough. The other side was saying this time, you’re not getting away with it.
But Trump took it one absurd step further. Never mind bigotry, and never mind hatred. “You had a group on the other side,” he said, “that came charging in without a permit.”
Yes, yes, Mr. President, now you’re getting to the heart of it!
“I don’t know if you know,” Trump came back to it again. “They had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit.”
Can’t you imagine it now? It’s 1930s Berlin, and Joseph Goebbels sits there with Hitler. “You know what we need, mein fuhrer?” he says. “We need a nice burning down of Jewish synagogues and businesses.”
“Yes,” says Hitler. “We could call it Kristallnacht.”
“But we don’t have a permit,” says Goebbels.
“Ach, you’re right,” says Hitler. “If only we had a permit, we might conquer the whole world.”
Permits, now there’s your issue, America.
Top photo: A white supremacist trying to strike a counterprotestor with a white nationalist flag during clashes at Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, Aug. 12, 2017. (Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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