People can scrutinize plenty of offensive, untrue, and uncalled for instances spoken in the first Presidential Debate on Thursday, but I am going to narrow in on one of the concerning statements President Donald J. Trump made and what he said when addressing it to the media two days later. I
n the debate, mediator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he condoned white supremacy, a white supremacist group the Proud Boys, and militia groups, and his response was "I am willing to do that. Almost [all violence from white supremacists] I see [are] from the left wing [and] not from the right." Neither the Chris Wallace nor Vice President Joe Biden claimed that the right was to blame for white supremacy (which it is), yet when Trump was asked this question, he immediately tried to defame the left rather than clarifying that he did not support white supremacy and the antifa (anti-fascist) 'movement.'
Two days after the debate, Trump publicly attempted to clear up the 'misunderstanding' that he does not condone white supremacy with Fox's Sean Hannity; he said, "Let me be clear again: I condemn the KKK, I condemn all white supremacists, I condemn the Proud Boys. I don't know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing, but I condemn that." This would me more convincing if it were not for the fact that this is not the first time that he has said something that has led people to believe that he does not condemn, and actually encourages, white supremacists.
Trump publicly praised white supremacists less than a hundred days before this debate.
On June 28th, 2020, at 7:39 am, Trump retweeted a video of a white man chanting "white power" with a caption that read, "Thank you to [these] great people of The Villages;" he deleted this tweet a few hours later. Also, this may not be his own actions, but Richard Spencer, a Neo-Nazi leader, has publicly praised Trump for being a big part of why white supremacy began to thrive in America again. Spenser made a speech at an 'alt-right' conference in Washington, D.C. on November of 2016 where he not only expressed how Trump's campaign "...really opened the door for [them]. America was, until this past generation, a white country designed for ourselves and posterity... it belongs to us... Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!" Spencer also accredited Trump for the extremely violent "Unite the Right rally" in Charlottesville, Virginia back in 2017. These were far from private statements and rallies, so Trump certainly knew about these statements and support from white supremacists for several years and has not once addressed these horrific accreditations.
Trump has a history of ignoring and encouraging white supremacists. He only condemned them because he was confronted with how serious his neglect to confirm he does not support them was; the Black Lives Matter movement emphasized the phrase "White silence is violence," and the President of the United States should have been the first to acknowledge these things if he truly condemned white supremacy and violence against people of color.
