“As with so many of Trump’s forays into self-serving megalomaniacal fantasy, it’s easy to lose the larger narrative thread amid the blizzard of rank falsehood. The clear subtext of Tuesday’s performance was to drive home the message that, at some level, the left protesters in Charlottesville deserved what they got. Why on earth would our president otherwise go out of his way to insist that the victims of a violent terrorist assault share a “semblance of guilt” and “have [a] problem”? Why spend the lion’s share of a policy photo-op inveighing against the alleged violent tendencies of the American left? And why bother to seek an “other side” in a tragic encounter with racist reaction? The real moral failure to anyone following the Charlottesville aftermath is that this episode mirrored to a chilling degree the awful iconography of civil-rights protests in the Jim Crow South, with entitled white power acting with violent impunity against the threat of dissent, and local law enforcement standing largely to the side, impassive. The key difference between those protests and last week’s Charlottesville massacre, though, was that the American presidency then aligned itself on the side of anti-racist protest; now, to the eternal shame of our entire civic culture, the presidency is emphatically, militantly, on the side of moral wrong.
In one sense, the bankrupt logic of two-sidesism is a direct outgrowth of the many allied corruptions of our two-party system. The pundit and presidential mind alike gravitate to the irresistible, self-canceling logic of impartially apportioned views and opinions organized along a strictly undeviating bipolar grid. It’s the same reason that the alibi of first resort for amoral journalistic hacks is that, if partisans on either side of this or that debate of the moment are griping about their coverage, why they must be doing their jobs in perfect Goldilocks fashion—just right.
But these are also the same forces that locked sickeningly into gear to normalize everything about Trump’s rise to power. As Trump emerged out of the sodden 2016 GOP primary field, our politico-journalistic establishment obsessively tracked his progress toward mass acceptance—without, for instance, treating the birther libel, the immigration-bashing, the anti-Muslim xenophobia, or the marshaling of an overtly racist base at the fount of his campaign as first-order disqualifications for holding high office. Trump was, after all, cruising to a major-party nomination, and criticism of such a figure should be primly quarantined to the designated (and in this case, howlingly ineffectual) leaders of the opposition party. Thus, to take just one grotesque example, CNN became an open-air bazaar of Trump sycophancy, following the similar bankrupt moral reasoning that, since this Trump fellow was attracting so much attention, it was the network’s solemn difference-trimming duty to roll out the pundit red carpet for a sorry array of racists, liars, and bottom-feeding “commentators” to dutifully recite Trump-adoring talking points. But even CNN, it seems, can recognize the rapid approach of a moral catastrophe—albeit, of course, when it’s far too late to do the network or the rest of us much good. Jeffrey Lord, the first Trump ghoul to sign a long-term pundit contract with Jeff Zucker’s intellectual chop shop, was finally let go for tweeting the fragrant fascist greeting “Sieg Heil” to a critic at the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America. (Like every alt-right asshole everywhere, Lord claimed that he intended his Nazi salute ironically. See? There are always two sides!) It’s reassuring, I suppose, to know that even a terminally addled news organization like CNN can still recognize a moral calamity sitting in its own green room. It remains to be seen, however, whether our media establishment can ever rouse itself to call out, with unqualified honesty, the lunatic fascist in the Oval Office for the racist stooge he always has been, and shall ever be.” - Chris Lehmann, “CTRL-ALT-FAIL,” The Baffler. August 16, 2016.