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The debate on whether or not President Trump encouraged the man who set out to slaughter Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh It's a shouting match.
"Yes, he did!"
"No, he did not!"
And it will be more likely to make things worse, and it will be more important than ever.
Here's a better question: Is Trump helping?
The answer is obviously no – and that's bad enough.
Let us stipulate that the pro-Israel father of Ivanka Trump, who converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner, is not "literally Hitler." But let's also say that it's something about Trump and his MAGA nationalism that's been, and remains, very attractive to bigots. This does not mean that everyone who jumped aboard the Trump train is a bigot. Far from it. But it is simply true that some people who are bigots, and Trump and his team have been dismayingly unconcerned about this fact.
I have some personal experience here. When the alt-right rallied to Trump starting in 2015, I was one of their targets. I was besieged with anti-semitic filth. I ranked sixth on the Anti-Defamation League's list of targeted Jewish journalists. Once, when I mentioned that my brother had died, I was pelted with "jokes" asking if he'd be turned into a soap or a lampshade.
While the attacks shocked me, I was more dismayed by how little many fellow conservatives seemed to care about the entire phenomenon. This was back when Steve Bannon – later the Trump campaign's CEO and eventually the president's senior adviser – still wanted Breitbart.com to be a "platform" for the alt-right.
The best defense of Trump at the time was ignorance and, ironically, bigotry – toward Republicans. A lifelong New York Democrat, Trump had no real understanding of what traditional conservatives and Republicans believed. In 2000, when he went to the Reform Party's presidential nomination, he said he was trying to keep bigots from taking over the party. "He's obviously been having an affair with Adolf Hitler," said Patrick Buchanan. Trump's dream running mate: Oprah.
In 2016, after years of cultivating support for his birtherism, Trump still believed many of the liberal stereotypes of the GOP as a hothouse of bigotry. That's why he's struggling to repudiate David Duke and let's Putin's and the alt-right's racist troll armies fight in his name. Trump thought he needed them.
Trump is even more ignorant about how to be presidential. He is the first president who does not even know how to pretend to be a unifying figure. Instead, he is enraptured by the rapture of his base, feeding them red meat, dog whistles, and cultural wedge issues – anything to keep one's attention, negative or positive, on him. He often says it would be "so easy to be presidential" but, as he said at Pennsylvania rally in March, "you'd all be right here, you'd be so bored." Why try to unify the country if the price is a little less applause and attention?
This dynamic has had a transformative effect on Trump, his base – and his opponents. Trump long resisted calling himself a "nationalist," fearing it was kooky Bannon stuff. Now he embraces it, heedless of its implications to others not already on his team. The media has gone from being biased (it is), to being "fake" (it's not), to being the "enemy of the people" and tantamount to a fifth column.
Many in the trumpified right-wing media amplify and reinforce all of this because they, too, are addicted to the same base.
Amidst the mail-bomb scare last week Trump tweeted about how unfair it is that CNN can criticize him "yet when I criticize them they go wild and scream, 'it's just not Presidential!'" The false equivalence is lost on him and his biggest defenders. CNN is not the president. It's in a different lane. And while some of its coverage is worthy of criticism, it is not – or should not be – a warrant for Trump to leave his lane.
I do not think Trump deliberately encouraged the slaughter in Pittsburgh. But every day he fuels a sense of chaos, a feeling that none of the norms or rules apply anymore. And that is bad enough. It certainly is not helping. The president is supposed to at least try.
Jonah Goldberg's new book, "Suicide of the West," is now available wherever books are sold.
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