Ellis Cose

Opinion columnist

A year ago, it seemed unfathomable: an American president defiantly defending “very fine people on both sides” of neo-Nazism; an American president suggesting moral equivalency between fighting for racial equality and championing white supremacy.

To be fair, President Donald Trump was making a somewhat subtler point. In his colloquy with the press, he was not calling neo-Nazis great folks but arguing that many of the Confederate-statue-loving protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, were not neo-Nazis at all. Somehow, these “fine people” got mixed in with white supremacists shouting, “Jews will not replace us,” and never noticed their compatriots were not fine people, too.

As for Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old idealist plowed down and killed in Charlottesville by a 21-year-old driver said to idolize Adof Hitler, Trump tweeted on Aug. 16: "Memorial service today for beautiful and incredible Heather Heyer, a truly special young woman. She will be long remembered by all!"

More than a year-and-a half into the Trump presidency, many have accepted the reality that Trump is unlike any U.S. president previously seen, that he wallows in divisive rhetoric and tolerates odious behavior because he so often indulges in it.

Trump inflames racial tensions

His recent assault on LeBron James as stupid and CNN host Don Lemon as stupider (“low IQ” is his go-to insult for blacks) is par for the course. It’s impossible, at this point, to be surprised by boorish behavior in someone who consistently acts like a boob. The trap — and one that Trump could easily lead us into — is to start thinking such behavior is not just normal for Trump but normal.

In his press availability addressing Charlottesville last year, Trump was asked whether race relations had gotten worse. He replied that they were “better or the same,” but added, “They have been frayed for a long time.” In other words, although he predicted race relations would improve, he emphasized how fraught and “frayed” they were. Who could blame him if they stayed that way — or got worse? Despite promising racial harmony through job creation, he was betting the opposite.

Indeed, his political career was built on betting the opposite. It effectively began with birtherism, blossomed with talk of Mexican rapists and Muslim terrorists, and flourished with allusions to gang-bangers spilling over the border.

At a recent rally in Tampa, Florida, he fired up the crowd by ridiculing Democrats’ desire for “open borders, which equals massive crime.” They “want to let MS-13 rule our country,” he declared, adding, “Every day the brave men and women of ICE are liberating communities and towns from savage gangs like MS-13 that are occupying our country like another nation would.”

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Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of the Lawfare blog, spent more than a year chasing down one of Trump’s statistics. In a speech before Congress in February 2017, Trump cited a Justice Department study showing “the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.” After repeated requests for information from the Justice Department, Wittes concluded that the president was lying. Justice never generated such a statistic.

Nor, as fact-checkers have confirmed, is there evidence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement liberating towns across America from savage, immigrant gangs.

Such falsehoods have a transparent purpose — one aligned with neo-Nazi propaganda. They are designed to make us believe that hatred, suspicion and dread of marginalized populations is not just normal but noble.

Racism has become a normal occurrence

In March, the Council on American-Islamic Relations released a report documenting a 74 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes since Trump took office. In June, Scientific American cited a scholarly study suggesting that “Trump’s Islamic-related tweets may be directly linked to an increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes over the past few years.” An NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll this May found that 30 percent of Americans see race as the biggest source of division in the country, and that 45 percent think race relations are getting worse.

When our president warns of marauding hordes pouring across the border and refers to brown people seeking asylum as an infestation, it’s no surprise that people are fretting over race relations.

In 2009, I visited Rwanda and talked to men who had participated in the attempted genocide 15 years earlier, many of whom were in prison. Why, I asked, had they tortured and killed their Tutsi neighbors? Some refused to give a direct answer. Others claimed they were wrongly accused. But the typical response among those who answered was that they thought they were doing what the state wanted them to do. They thought they were doing good. They thought they were performing a service by ridding the world of people the government called “cockroaches.”

Thank God we have gotten nowhere near that point in America — yet — although one could argue that putting immigrant children considered part of an infestationin cages is a step in that direction.

A year after the tragic events in Charlottesville, white supremacists seem emboldened. Although part of a street has been named for Heather Heyer, and her accused murderer is in jail charged with murder and federal hate crime violations, we remain a conflicted nation. Indeed, that seems to be part of Trump’s vision for our country, but there is no reason why it should be ours. There is no nobility in falling into Trump’s trap or in normalizing his ethnic animus. Although wallowing in bigotry might help Trump politically, it only diminishes us as individuals and as a people.

Ellis Cose, a fellow of the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement at the University of California and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is the author of "The End of Anger." He is writing a history of the ACLU and civil liberties in America. Follow him on Twitter: @EllisCose.