Will Charlottesville Matter in Six Months?

I’ve mentioned many times that I really respect Dan Balz as a bigfoot political print reporter. I think he does his job about as well as anyone can within the strictures of the genre. I believe he has respect from officeholders on both sides of the aisle who know he is tough but fair. That’s why it’s notable that when he went to report of the state of the GOP in the post-Charlottesville world he discovered that “Few [Republicans] were willing to talk about what comes next, even anonymously, and most elected officials and party leaders contacted declined requests for interviews altogether.”

In the aftermath of the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Republican lawmakers and leaders face the most unpalatable set of choices yet in their relationship with President Trump. They are caught between disgust over his failure to unequivocally condemn neo-Nazism, a desire to advance a conservative agenda and fears of rupturing the Trump-GOP coalition ahead of the 2018 elections.

As a result, he needed to collect statements that were already in the public record. And, of course, he had to use some anonymous quotes even if they were also hard to come by. I was particularly struck by the following:

A Republican strategist who is directly engaged in 2018 politics said progress on the GOP agenda, particularly tax cuts, could help to diminish some of the anguish that has been on display this past week. “Cutting middle-class taxes and improving the economy?” the strategist said. “A lot of people will forgive a lot of sins if that happens.”

But he conceded that the week’s events could complicate that path to success. “I would be very hesitant to say [Charlottesville] has real meaning six months from now,” he added. “I think where it hurts the most, it’s just another thing that makes it harder to get the middle-class tax cut done.”

Maybe that reads worse than it should, and maybe it’s clear-eyed and shrewd political analysis, but it comes off as morally bankrupt. The president of the United States has been openly siding with neo-nazis and white supremacists, calling many of them “good people.” If you don’t believe me, listen to the son of the founder of Stormfront, Derek Black:

[Trump] said: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

But this protest, contrary to his defense, was advertised unambiguously as a white nationalist rally. The marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us”; in the days leading up to the event, its organizers called it “a pro-white demonstration”; my godfather, David Duke, attended and said it was meant to “fulfill the promises of Donald Trump”; and many attendees flew swastika flags. Whatever else you might say about the rally, they were not trying to deceive anyone.

Mr. Black claims that Trump’s “words marked possibly the most important moment in the history of the modern white nationalist movement” and that “his comments supporting the rally gave new purpose to the white nationalist movement, unlike any endorsement it has ever received.”

This somehow has “no real meaning” except, perhaps, that it will complicate efforts to reduce taxes on our nation’s most affluent citizens.

Obviously, the president’s comments have meaning for millions of Americans. They gave encouragement to white nationalists. They appalled the vast majority of Americans. His position was objectively indefensible on any moral plane. But supposedly they were the kind of sin that can be easily forgiven if an envelope full of tens of thousands of dollars arrives in the mail.

Except, who would gets those envelopes? How many people would receive them? And what percentage of those people would truly forgive and forget this kind of behavior from their president in return for cold hard cash?

In truth, Trump’s base is made up of people who sympathize with the white nationalists or who judge all politics by how well it pays. This helps explain Trump’s persistently high poll numbers among self-identified Republicans. It also explains how he carved out a narrow Electoral College victory.

Yet, that narrow Electoral College coalition isn’t looking so great:

We already know that Trump is capable of significantly outperforming his poll numbers, and whether he can win again or not isn’t really relevant when we’re discussing the moral dimension of the Republicans’ response to his behavior. Anyone who is quick to forgive the president in anticipation of financial compensation is clearly deficient as a moral actor. If that accurately describes most of the Republican officeholders in the country and the majority of GOP voters who don’t outright agree with the neo-Nazis, then we’re on solid ground condemning the entire political party on moral grounds.

This Republican strategist “who is directly engaged in 2018 politics” is making a cool calculation that Trump’s approval ratings will recover if the right people get paid and the economy hums, but he goes further than that and says that this will mean that the whole Charlottesville incident will not matter in six months.

Of course, we have to ask: “matter, to whom?”

Or maybe we have to ask “who matters?”