In the wake of the tragic synagogue shooting in Pennsylvania last week, a group called Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership is telling President Trump that he’s not welcome to visit Pittsburgh until he has denounced white supremacy.
“Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted,” the group wrote in an open letter. “You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. Yesterday’s massacre is not the first act of terror you incited against a minority group in our country.”
All of this without the slightest shred of evidence, naturally.
But if a denouncement of white supremacy, anti-semitism, and other forms of hate are what the group wants, they need not wait around. Trump has made these very disavowals dozens of times, which is remarkable because there is actually no reason for him to. The left has simply made up its mind that Trump is a racist and that people who are racist support Trump. No doubt, the latter is true in some instances (not the synagogue shooting, notably). But why would that be Trump’s problem? Did the media go into a frenzy every time some Islamist tweeted support for the last guy?
In any case, here are six times that Trump has spoken out against racial and religious hate, starting with this tweet from just ONE day before Bend the Arc released their letter:
“This evil Anti-Semitic attack is an assault on humanity. It will take all of us working together to extract the poison of Anti-Semitism from our world. We must unite to conquer hate.”
Ah, sounds just like the words of a lifetime Nazi sympathizer, right?
August 2015
Trump was asked by Bloomberg’s John Heilemann about former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, who had said on his radio show that he was in favor of Trump’s campaign promises.
“How do you feel about the David Duke quasi-endorsement?” Heilemann asked.
“I don’t need his endorsement; I certainly wouldn’t want his endorsement. I don’t need anyone’s endorsement,” Trump replied.
“Would you repudiate David Duke?” Heilemann pressed.
“Sure, I would do that, if it made you feel better,” Trump said. “I don’t know anything about him. Somebody told me yesterday, whoever he is, he did endorse me. Actually I don’t think it was an endorsement. He said I was absolutely the best of all of the candidates.”
February 2016
The David Duke matter raised its ugly head again the following February when Duke said that “voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage.”
This eventually led to the oft-cited Jake Tapper interview where Trump, sick of having to talk about a white supremacist that had absolutely nothing to do with his campaign, insisted that he didn’t know anything about Duke or white supremacists. This caused the media (and Republicans) to go into a frenzy, claiming that Trump was playing with fire. But if they’d just paid attention to his news conference from two days before, they would have seen this exchange with a reporter:
“How do you feel about the recent endorsement from David Duke?”
“I didn’t even know he endorsed me,” Trump said. “David Duke endorsed me? Okay, all right. I disavow, okay?”
Plain, simple, to the point. But the media wouldn’t let this go for at least another week.
November 2016
A couple of weeks after the election, an alt-right group was caught on camera in Washington tossing up Nazi salutes and yelling, “Hail Trump.” An unsettling sight, to be sure, but again, had actually nothing to do with the president-elect. Trump soon sat down for a meeting with The New York Times in which he denounced the group and their support for his presidency.
“Of course, I disavow and condemn them,” he said. “It’s not a group I want to energize. And if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why.”
Asked about that disavowal and how it jibed with his hiring of Steve Bannon, Trump merely said, “If I thought he was a racist or alt-right, I wouldn’t even think about hiring him.”
February 2017
Around this time, the media was reporting on a rise in anti-semitic incidents around the country, including graffiti and knocked-over headstones at Jewish graveyards around the country. Naturally, at a news conference at the White House, a reporter wanted to know if Trump had anything to say about it.
“Number one, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. Number two, racism, the least racist person,” he said. “Let me just tell you something, that I hate the charge, I find it repulsive. I hate even the question because people that know me and you heard the prime minister, you heard Netanyahu yesterday, did you hear him, Bibi? He said, I’ve known Donald Trump for a long time and then he said, forget it. So you should take that instead of having to get up and ask a very insulting question like that.”
A day earlier, he simply told NBC: “Anti-semitism is horrible and it’s going to stop.”
August 2017
This was the BIG MOMENT in Trump’s presidency in which a bunch of leftists who had already long decided that he was a racist decided once and for all that…he was a racist. But in the wake of the mangled protest/street brawl/murder scene that was the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, Trump did not hesitate to condemn white supremacists.
In remarks immediately following the violence, Trump said in a statement: “No matter the color of our skin or our ethnic heritage, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God.”
He was similarly unequivocal later that week when Congress passed a resolution condemning “white nationalists, white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups.”
After saying he would “absolutely” sign the resolution, he did.
***
So as much as we sympathize with the Pittsburgh Jewish community right now, they have no reason to call on Trump to disavow the kind of hatred and animus that led Robert Bowers to commit this heinous massacre. He has done so specifically in this case and he has done so many times in the past. And we’re sure, given the obsessions of this media, he will be forced to do so many more times before his presidency is over.
Comments are closed.