The real lesson Trump learned from Charlottesville

The following article by Annie Karni was posted on the Politico website August 5, 2018:

The president emerged from a low point of his presidency unscathed with his loyal voters, and has turned race into a key issue for the midterms — and beyond.

President Trump after Charlottesville rally in the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan. Credit: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

The content of President Donald Trump’s dig at basketball superstar LeBron James might have been standard Trump fare — questioning the intelligence of a prominent African-American who has been critical of him — but the timing of the tweet made it stand out on Friday night.

The post landed almost exactly a year after the deadly clash between white nationalists and Black Lives Matter protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, when the president refused to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis outright.

That moment temporarily left Trump on an island, abandoned by Republicans on the Hill and corporate executives who had previously played nice with the president on his business councils, and was a low-water mark of his presidency — one that, according to presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, “puts him in the dung heap of presidents who are completely insensitive of race in the United States.”

View the complete article here.