Anyone could have predicted the latest outrage
By David Remnick
... Obama warned that no one really changes in the Presidency; rather, the office "magnifies" who you already are. So if you "accept the support of Klan sympathizers before you’re President, or you’re .. slow in disowning it .. then that’s how you’ll be as President."
Donald Trump’s ascent was hardly the first sign that Americans had not uniformly regarded Obama’s election as an inspiring chapter in the country’s fitful progress toward equality. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, had branded him the "food-stamp President." In the right-wing and white-nationalist media, Obama was, variously, a socialist, a Muslim, the Antichrist, a "liberal fascist" .. assembling his own Hitler Youth. A high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim .. was a secret effort to connect the brothels of Nevada to the innocents at Disneyland. He was, by nature, suspect ... In the meantime, beginning on the day of Obama’s first inaugural, the Secret Service fielded an unprecedented number of threats against the President’s person.
And so, speeding toward yet another airport last November, Obama seemed like a weary man who harbored a burning seed of apprehension. "We’ve seen this coming," he said. "Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails" ...
Last week, the world witnessed Obama’s successor in the White House, unbound and unhinged, acting more or less as Obama had predicted. In 2015, a week after Trump had declared his candidacy, he spoke in favor of removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s capitol: "Put it in the museum and let it go." But, last week, abandoning the customary dog whistle of previous Republican culture warriors, President Trump made plain his indulgent sympathy for neo-Nazis, Klan members, and unaffiliated white supremacists, who marched with torches, assault rifles, clubs, and racist and anti-Semitic slogans through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. One participant even adopted an Isis terror tactic, driving straight into a crowd of people peaceably demonstrating against the racists. Trump had declared an "America First" culture war in his Inaugural Address, and now .. he .. cast his lot with the basest of his base. There were some "very fine people" among the white nationalists, he said, and their "culture" should not be threatened ...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/donald-trumps-true-allegiances
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