His staff is “stunned,” we’re told. Really? Why? Did they think he was a decent or thoughtful or humane guy?

Of course they didn’t, but I suppose they must have thought he had enough self-control to hide quite what a foul mindless sadistic demon he is. I suppose they’re stunned that he blew the thing so wide open.

Multiple sources inside and close to the White House described the president’s senior staff as confused and frustrated, caught off guard by Trump’s decision to defend his initial response to the violence in Virginia.

He “went rogue,” one senior White House official told NBC News.

The president’s team had choreographed a plan: he would descend the golden elevators of Trump Tower and step to the lectern in the lobby, flanked by his Treasury Secretary, his Transportation Secretary and his top economic adviser. He would highlight the infrastructure executive order he had just signed, and then he’d leave — head back upstairs and deploy his aides to handle any inquiries.

Instead, he took questions and had a full-on racist tantrum. Kids say the darndest things!

David Rothkopf in the Post:

Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon gave the most disgusting public performance in the history of the American presidency. Framed by the vulgar excess of the lobby of Trump Tower, the president of the United States shook loose the constraints of his more decent-minded advisers and, speaking from his heart, defended white supremacists and by extension, their credos of hatred. He equated with those thugs the courageous Americans who had gathered to stand up to the racism, anti-Semitism and doctrine of violence that won the cheers and Nazi salutes of the alt-right hordes to whom Trump felt such loyalty.

He made it crystal clear, in case anyone hadn’t caught on yet, that the reason it took him so long to rebuke the racist rally is the fact that he didn’t want to, because he liked it.

No one who values the best of what the United States has stood for could watch without feeling revulsion, anger or heartbreak. No one who comes from a past such as mine, which includes similar mobs rising up and ultimately collaborating in the murder of dozens of my family members in Hitler’s Europe, could view Trump’s performance without a degree of fear as well. Certainly, the same must be true for African Americans who have watched such mobs lynch their family members and seek to deny them the most basic rights.

Remember Edgar Ray Killen? He’s the KKK guy who was the architect of the murder of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964. It’s as if we’d made him president. It’s as if we’d made Bull Connor president, or George Wallace, or David Duke. It’s that disgraceful and shaming and filthy.

He has to go.

Every day Trump remains in office is a victory for the extremists. But in that same moment on Tuesday, Trump made it clear that to defeat the champions of hatred in the United States, he must go. That he also must go to preserve the United States’ standing in the world, to ensure the safety of our people and our way of life has also been made clear in the past week. It is now time that we follow his dangerous words with our own actions. It is why Heather Heyer was on that street in Charlottesville. We owe it to her and to ourselves to remove him from office as soon as the law permits. Trump himself has demonstrated the price of each day of delay.

25th Amendment.

The Nazi in chief gave a ragey press conference (or q&a session or whatever) this afternoon, by way of making sure we understood that he’s just as disgusting as we thought.

President Trump angrily defended himself on Tuesday against criticism that he did not specifically condemn Nazi and white supremacist groups following the weekend’s deadly racial unrest in Virginia, and at one point questioned whether the movement to pull down statues of Confederate leaders would escalate to the desecration of George Washington.

In a long, combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan, the president repeatedly rejected a torrent of bipartisan criticism for waiting two days before naming the right-wing groups and placing blame on “many sides” for the violence on Saturday that ended with the death of a young woman after a car crashed into a crowd.

He’s like everybody’s least favorite relative, and it’s always Thanksgiving, and you can never leave.

Mr. Trump defended those gathered in the Charlottesville park to protest the statue’s removal, saying, “I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”

Yes they were. That’s what they were there for. That’s what the rally was about.

Mr. Trump unleashed a torrent of frustration at the news media, saying they were being “fake” because they did not acknowledge that his initial statement about the Charlottesville protest was “very nice.”

That’s because it was not “very nice.” Nor was it moderately nice or a tiny bit nice. It was zero nice at all.

The president added that blame for the violence in the city – which also took the lives of two Virginia state troopers when their helicopter crashed – should also be on people from “the left” who came to oppose the nationalist protesters.

“You had a group on one side and the other, and they came at each other with clubs, and it was vicious and horrible. It was a horrible thing to watch,” the president said. “There is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You have just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. You can say what you want. That’s the way it is.”

…

The president’s breathtaking statements inflamed and stunned people across Twitter.

“White supremacy is repulsive,” wrote Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin. “This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.”

So do something about it. Step up. Do something.

David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, praised Mr. Trump’s comments as a condemnation of “leftist terrorists.”

“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville,” Mr. Duke said in a Twitter post.

Terrific. Absolutely wonderful. We have a raging racist as president and David Duke is thanking him for being such an awesome racist. That’s where we are.

on Tuesday, Mr. Trump returned to his initial feelings about the subject, which poured out without much prompting from reporters at Trump Tower.

“There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country,” the president said.

Mr. Trump said his initial statement on Saturday was shaped by a lack of information about the events on the ground in Charlottesville, even though television statements had been broadcasting images of the violence throughout the morning.

“There was no way of making a correct statement that early,” the president said. “I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters. I didn’t know David Duke was there. I wanted to see the facts.”

But Mr. Trump also made it clear that even now –- with the benefit of hindsight -– he does not accept the overwhelming criticism that he should have reserved his condemnation for the white supremacist and Nazi groups.

But referring to the reporters assembled, he insisted that he had watched the protests “much more closely than you people watched it.” He said that he believes there were “bad” people on both sides, and he criticized other for being unwilling to say that.

“You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” the president said. “Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now. You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent.”

The US president is an authoritarian fascist, and the “checks and balances” aren’t doing a damn thing about it.

Chris Cillizza explains Trump’s thinking on the whole fascism is bad-I love fascism thing.

On Monday night, just hours after he had, finally, condemned in harsh terms the neo-Nazis and white supremacists involved in violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Donald Trump took to Twitter. And he retweeted thisfrom a man named Jack Posobiec:

“Meanwhile: 39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that?”

It’s true, there were many shootings in Chicago over the weekend. It was 30, not 39, according to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times. Nine people died. But this is more about who Trump chose to retweet.

Posobiec is a well-known figure on Twitter — he has more than 181,000 followers — thanks to his vociferous defenses of Trump and his willingness to promote conspiracy theories.

He is, to put it kindly, an unreliable source. He peddles falsehoods. He is a provocateur, more interested in making headlines than adhering to established facts.

Trump. This morning. He retweeted a cartoon of a train killing a reporter. Haha. It’s one of his funny jokes, you see. Haha. If only all the reporters were dead, so that all we knew about Trump would come from his own PR team. Haha. So funny.

President Trump has retweeted a cartoon of a train bearing the Trump logo killing a CNN reporter, just days after a protester at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was fatally run down by a driver who participated in that rally. The cartoon reads “Fake news can’t stop the Trump train.” In July, Trump shared a GIF of himself beating the CNN logo to a pulp. Thirty minutes after promoting the cartoon at 7 a.m. Tuesday, it was deleted from Trump’s Twitter feed.

Thirty minutes too late, because we’ve seen it now.

Here’s something else he retweeted, and this one is still there.

FOX NEWS EXCLUSIVE: President Trump 'seriously considering' a pardon for ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio https://t.co/Rgw8l7i9Xl

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) August 14, 2017

He’s thinking about pardoning Joe Arpaio, whom Fox & friends calls the “colorful” former Arizona sheriff. No, he wasn’t a “colorful” sheriff, he was a sadistic sheriff who got away with it for years. NBC News takes a more sober view of him.

Critics said the pardon would be an endorsement of racism and further hypocrisy on the part of the president and blasted Trump for “attempting to lionize” Arpaio by calling him a ‘great American patriot’ despite his racial profiling of Latinos…

Arpaio is facing sentencing in October following his conviction on criminal contempt of court. A federal judge found Arpaio willfully disobeyed orders to stop arresting immigrants solely on the suspicion that they were in the country illegally. Before that, Arpaio had also been found to be ignoring court orders to stop racially profiling and illegally detaining Latinos.

So this is his poke in the eye to the rest of us for the fact that he was forced to pretend to condemn racism yesterday. This is his “Hahahaha I didn’t mean a word of it, suckers. If you force me to pretend I hate racism I’ll just do something extra racist an hour later.”

Salvador Reza, a Phoenix community organizer, said in a statement that Trump was throwing a bone to Nazi and Ku Klux Klan supporters after being forced to condemn them.

“He is also sending a signal to law enforcement nationwide that they can disobey a federal judge and disregard the constitution, whenever the victims are racially profiled for their ethnicity, color of skin or national origin,” said Reza.

Cecilia Wang, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said if Trump follows through, he would be pardoning Arpaio’s “flagrant violation of federal court orders that prohibited the illegal detention of Latinos.”

“Make no mistake,” said Wang, “this would be an official presidential endorsement of racism.”

Official and conspicuous and advertised – by Trump, on Twitter. He’s letting us know. He wants to make sure we know. Mr Birther, Mr Kill the Central Park 5, Mr They’re all rapists, Mr Many sides, many sides – he wants to make damn sure we know. Trump despises brown and black people and he wants us to be in no doubt about that.

“He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He’s a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him,” Fox reported Trump said of Arpaio.

He wants to be very sure we know.

Jennifer Rubin on Trump’s too little too late:

He had to begin with some self-congratulations on the economy — because his accomplishments are what he really cares about. He told the country, “To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered.” He finally spit it out by calling racism “evil” and condemning the “KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups.”

He read from a teleprompter. Speaking from his heart would have been impossible, given his obvious lack of passion and willful blindness over the past couple of days. He did not mention the “alt-right,” nor did he announce he is firing Stephen K. Bannon, who once bragged he gave the alt-right a platform at Breitbart. He did not announce any specific policy measures. He did not apologize for his moral obtuseness. This was the weakest statement he could have gotten away with, 48 hours too late. Why did it have to come to this?

Because he is what he appears to be: a terrible, malevolent, hostile, self-aggrandizing, stupid human being. He hasn’t got a single quality or skill that would enable him to stop being what he appears to be.

One might conclude from Trump’s foot-dragging and obsession with stoking racial tensions (e.g. his vote fraud commission, his crusade against legal and illegal immigrants, etc.) that, despite his apologists’ protestations, his campaign message was aimed at white resentment. Trump continues to tell those who want to “take back their country” that “their” country is being overrun by foreigners, non-Christians, non-whites. The majority of his followers had a more benign, non-racial interpretation (take the country back from liberals, elites, urbanites, etc.), but it surely hit home and brought out from the shadows Duke and his ilk.

It’s where he feels at home.

There is another more mundane explanation for Trump’s grudging, belated statement and refusal even now to reject support from white nationalists — just as he refuses to speak a critical word about Vladimir Putin. This is classic narcissistic behavior. The sole determination of whether Trump likes someone (Saudi royalty, thuggish leaders, etc.) is whether they praise him. It’s always and only about him. He has been far more antagonistic toward Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his own attorney general (or even Ken Frazier of Merck, who resigned from Trump’s manufacturing council) than he has been toward white nationalists because the former were disloyal in his mind, the only unforgivable sin in the Trump White House.

Quite. He is exactly what he appears to be.

Trump finally, and one imagines with about 10 people pushing him just out of sight, sullenly said the thing he refused to say on Saturday. Too late, boyo.

President Donald Trump bowed to overwhelming pressure that he personally condemn white supremacists who incited bloody demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend — labeling their racist views “evil” after two days of equivocal statements.

“Racism is evil,” Mr. Trump said. “And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the K.K.K., neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

It’s a pity that by now we all know he doesn’t believe a word of that and didn’t want to say it. It’s a great pity that that’s who is president of the US right now – a stubborn angry determined racist, who has to be forced to disavow racism at a moment when the country is in turmoil after a racist / Nazi “protest” in Virginia.

That pressure reached boiling point early Monday after the president attacked the head of the pharmaceuticals company Merck, who is black, for quitting an advisory board over his failure to call out white nationalists.

Merck’s chief executive, Kenneth C. Frazier, resigned from the president’s American Manufacturing Council on Monday, saying he objected to the president’s statement on Saturday blaming violence that left one woman dead on “many sides.”

“America’s leaders must honor our fundamental views by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal,” Mr. Frazier said in a tweet announcing he was stepping down from the panel. Mr. Frazier is one of just a handful of black chief executives of a Fortune 500 company.

pic.twitter.com/a1PNQZism5

— Merck (@Merck) August 14, 2017

So Trump promptly attacked him on Twitter. He actually did that. He couldn’t use Twitter to condemn the death and multiple serious injuries in Charlottesville, but he rushed to use it to attack a black man who rebuked his racism. Trump is scum. He’s the muck at the bottom of a very stagnant pond.

Now that Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma has resigned from President's Manufacturing Council,he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2017

Mr. Trump’s shot at one of the country’s best-known black executives prompted an immediate outpouring of support for Mr. Frazier from major figures in business, media and politics. “Thanks @Merck Ken Frazier for strong leadership to stand up for the moral values that made this country what it is,” Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever, wrote on Twitter.

It’s not unusual for Mr. Trump to attack, via Twitter, any public figure who ridicules, criticizes or even mildly questions his actions. But his decision to take on Mr. Frazier, a self-made multimillionaire who rose from a modest childhood in Philadelphia to attend Harvard Law School, was extraordinary given the wide-ranging criticism he has faced from both parties for not forcefully denouncing the neo-Nazis and Klan sympathizers who rampaged in Charlottesville.

Trump is a narcissist, and deeply stupid. He’s nowhere near intelligent enough to figure out when he needs to repress his narcissism, or how to do that in the first place.

“It took Trump 54 minutes to condemn Merck CEO Ken Frazier, but after several days he still has not condemned murdering white supremacists,” Keith Boykin, a former aide to President Bill Clinton who comments on politics and race for CNN, wrote in a Tweet.

Exactly. He’s swift as an arrow to respond to narcissistic injury, and entirely indifferent to real injuries, including mortal ones, to anyone else. He’s a horror. He doesn’t even grasp that he needs to fake concern, which is a real novelty in politics.

So now, with his people shoving him hard, he said it. Way too late.