It would have become ‘Charlotteville-gate’ but its too long to print on t-shirts and it would go round your coffee mug twice. So instead we’ll call it ‘The Fuck Up’. Which is nothing if not completely accurate. An object lesson in how not to handle a disaster. By Donald J. Trump.

The town of Charlotteville decided to remove a statue of Robert E Lee, the confederate leader in the Civil War. Even though he was, at heart, a bit of a liberal. So every shit-kicking, mother-fucking, cross-burning, swastika-wearing, gun-toting redneck racist in the entire south of America turned up in protest. They’d announced they would. And when they turned up they were ready for war. In Virginia, if not other places in the US, you’re allowed to have a private army of gun-toting paramilitaries, just walking the streets, fully armed and loaded.

On the other side were the anti-nazis, the anti-fascists, the black rights groups, the Vegan Alliance, all kinds of ‘alt-left’ and tree-huggy types inherently opposed to fascism and racism. They too were kind-of armed, with clubs, pepper sprays, broccoli, that kind of thing.

The racists arrived. Not singing about slavery (bit late for that), nor about Robert E Lee, not even about jihadis. They were chanting this: “Jews will not replace us”. What? Who? How? Why???

Maybe the KKK had been getting a large number of rabbis making applications to join? Perhaps there’d been an invasion of Yeshiva-dudes in their Country & Western bars, the ones where the musicians play behind chicken wire? The odd thing being, there simply aren’t enough Jews in America to replace the rednecks anyway. And most of them would struggle to drive a beefed-up Chevy pick-up. But that’s what they sang.

Fights were inevitable, skirmishes, police involved trying to keep the rivals apart. Nothing unexpected. Until one dude drove his car into the anti-racist crowd and killed a woman.

Ok, so on day 1 Trump accused ‘both sides of causing trouble and violence’ and didn’t pick out the murderer for special praise. Nor even call it an act of neo-nazi terrorism. That had to wait til day 3 for that to emerge from the lips of the president but they were the words of others which he read off an autocue. At least he’d made a very belated, half-assed effort.

Then yesterday he went back to the ‘violence on all sides’ being the problem, giving, in the angry words of Paul Ryan, the Republican Chairman, ‘a moral equivalence’ between the neo-nazis and their opponents. For which David Duke, ex-head of the KKK, thanked the president. And when a man with his record thanks you, you know you’re way south of ‘doing the right thing’.

The saying goes: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. Donald J Trump has called in an industrial sized earth-mover.

I hate that man.

God Bless America

A xxxx