It may seem odd at this fearful juncture to point out any failings other than his and his abettors’. He and they are disgracing our country in ever more galling ways, with support from a fringe of white nationalists whose reprehensible ideology warrants all of the attention that it receives and more.

But the threat posed by Trump and his minions only increases the importance of being smart about stopping him, and his strategy for maintaining power includes driving wedges between us and making white Americans feel that they’re under assault. Why cooperate with that? Why be baited?

After the “abomination” column, Texas State turned into a furious, distressingly familiar theater of denunciation and counter-denunciation. The president of the university, understandably, condemned what the student had written as racist. So did the president of the student body. Campus groups representing minorities said that these rebukes didn’t take into account the slurs that they routinely endure. They’d been demonized and terrorized, so why such upset and outrage over a reversal of fortunes?

It’s a legitimate observation. It’s also a dead end. Turnabout may be fair play, but it’s foul morality. It’s also foolish politics. Mirroring the ugliness of white nationalists and the alt-right just gives them the ammunition that they want and need.

Which is precisely what some fevered activists at Evergreen State College did when they shouted down a white biology professor and the school’s white president, who stood there as one woman screamed: “Whiteness is the most violent system to ever breathe.” (I deleted the profanity between “violent” and “system.”)

It’s what an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware did with a Facebook post saying that Otto Warmbier — the American student who was imprisoned in North Korea, came home comatose and died soon after — “got exactly what he deserved.” The professor wrote that like other “young, white, rich, clueless white males” in the United States, Warmbier thought “he could get away with whatever he wanted.”