When moderator Chris Wallace gave Donald Trump an easy opportunity at last Tuesday’s presidential debate to denounce white supremacists, the president declined to do so. Instead, he said that the white nationalist Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.” Over the past week, a consensus has emerged among political pundits and other commentators that this was the low point of the night for Trump, in which he whiffed an obvious opportunity to say the right thing, and in doing so demonstrated once again that he essentially doesn’t see any reason to criticize white supremacists. It was like he was given a do-over of his post-Charlottesville remarks, and failed once again.
But I’ve seen little to no commentary on how basically absurd it is to pose this question to Donald Trump in the first place. If he had indeed done what pretty much any other presidential candidate would have done, and had declared his opposition to white supremacism, it would have been completely meaningless, because it would be a lie. Whether or not Donald Trump “denounces” white supremacists doesn’t change one bit the fact that he himself is a white supremacist who has attempted during his four years in office to turn the national government into an instrument and bastion of white supremacism. For Chris Wallace to pose the question, as if the answer would be meaningful, ignores this reality. Donald Trump no more opposes white supremacists than he opposes himself.
We are way past the point where anyone should be asking the president whether he will denounce white supremacists. He will not do so, and if he does, it would be a lie. Asking this question in fact suggests that whether Donald Trump might or might not support white supremacism depends to some extent on his answer to the question. Asking this question provides a lifeline to Donald Trump to obscure his actual intentions and policies from the American people.
We received a vivid demonstration of how misguided and misleading such a question is when Donald Trump spoke at a rally in Minnesota the day after the debate. He attacked refugees, and falsely accused Somali-American Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar not only of voter fraud, but as someone who has no place in U.S. government, saying, “Then she tells us how to run our country. Can you believe it?” Reacting to the president’s vile words, Ronald Brownstein tweeted that, “Again his message to his voters is that people of color, big cities, liberals are interlopers in the real America-their White Christian America. Anyone still in his coalition can have no illusions about the racism embedded in its core.” And NPR’s Steve Inskeep noted the through-line between these comments and his Proud Boys remarks at the debate, tweeting that, “This goes much, much farther than the Proud Boys remark. And it’s an ordinary sequence for the president. Plays off his core message.”
Perhaps asking the president to denounce white supremacists back in 2017 made sense, after the dark Charlottesville spectacle but before the president had provided us with literally years of overwhelming evidence of placing a white supremacist mindset at the center of his presidency. Though it may be illuminating for some when he refuses to denounces white supremacists now, the question itself provides him with a fig leaf of plausible deniability that he does not deserve.