Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” host Nicolle Wallace said President Donald Trump gave “cover” to white nationalists and racists while serving as commander-in-chief.
Joy Reid said, “I think Charlottesville crystallized what the core complaint about Donald Trump has been throughout his public life, which is that he brings forward blatantly bigoted views and that he has a soft spot for people like those tiki torch marchers—that he does see some redeeming quality in white nationalism.”
She continued “He is unabashedly white nationalist in his sensibility. And that’s where he still stands even now. I think not since Woodrow Wilson have we had a president that had that embrace of that kind of white supremacist attitude and not be embarrassed about it.”
Wallace said, “George W. Bush stayed really quiet during the eight years of the Obama presidency because he’d been in the office and didn’t think it was helpful for the office of the presidency to have any of your predecessors out there offering commentary. What really surprised me, he made a very pointed speech with a direct rebuke of Trumpism, if not Donald Trump, and one of the most memorable lines—you and I were on the air together that day, Rev— is that bigotry has been emboldened. And I wonder why more Republicans won’t speak out about—we don’t need to debate whether Donald Trump is a racist because the results speak for themselves. white nationalists, racists, think they have some cover while he’s president.”
Evan McMullin said, “Yes, they absolutely do, and, you know, the reasons why Republicans don’t more often talk about equality and advocate for equality, as I believe they should, as I would hope that they should, is because that word has become politically loaded for reasons that it’s not—it’s not justifiable. We don’t have time to talk about it.”
He continued, “There are debates about what that word means, sadly, partisan debates. But they have—what they’ve done is they’ve caused the Republican party to drift away of what its core meaning is that all of us all men and women, despite—regardless of our color, gender, any of that, we are all created equal. Our country was founded about that premise, although imperfectly applied for some time, still imperfectly applied. But Republicans have stopped fighting for equality in America for a while. That has allowed this white supremacist base to become more emboldened over time. Certainly, right now it is. And so it becomes very difficult for Republicans, even if they are centrist Republicans, to even speak about that issue because they are unwilling to—they are unwilling to fight for it. the future of the party, if it is to have a future, must be one in which Republicans say we’ll fight for equality as much as we say we’re fighting for liberty.”
Wallace added, “I actually think Donald Trump makes it very easy to be for equality because the other choice is to bolster, to support, to give safe harbor to what George Bush describes as an emboldened bigotry.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.