What Charlottesville clarifies: Trump's moral deficits could be our undoing He is the firebug who disowns the blaze he kindled with his own words. They have become a conflagration that cannot easily be extinguished.

Ross K. Baker | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption WH clarifies statement on Charlottesville violence The White House released a statement Sunday clarifying what President Trump meant regarding the Charlottesville, Virginia violence.

It's depressing to think that President's Trump's anodyne response to the violence in Charlottesville, Va. was prompted by the basest of all motives: a reluctance to identify certain of his supporters as being outside the boundaries of acceptable political protest. Perhaps his practice of replaying the highlights of his successful 2016 campaign causes him to shrink from saying anything that would alienate even the most extreme elements of his constituency.

As president, he has refused to recant the most inflammatory words to which he gave voice in his many rallies throughout the course of the campaign. In fact, he persists with the same belligerent tone when he leaves Washington to visit the scenes of his political triumphs. In doing so he has encouraged the most dangerous and violent of his followers and cannot find it within himself to single them out as the aggressors in the riot in Charlottesville. He is the firebug who disowns the blaze he kindled with his own words.

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It would be a monumental understatement to say that Trump has not been a calming influence on a country in which longstanding political divisions were already dividing Americans into armed camps. Trump astutely but cynically played the polarization card by exacerbating these pre-existing tensions. It was the most irresponsible and destructive course of action taken by any major political figure in American history.

He took legitimate political concerns over immigration, globalization and economic inequality and and offered feel-good remedies that more often involved scapegoating than achievable solutions. He did so in the apparent belief that they would do no lasting harm to the country or, perhaps, that people would forget his words, or take them to be an acceptable form of rhetorical excess that is now commonplace in a country inured to road rage and f-bombs dropped casually in conversations.

But words, especially toxic words, tend to have a long half-life. The plain meaning of the slogan "lock her up," as one example, is nothing more than an accusation that political rivals are not simply opponents but criminals.

It is sad to say, but dry political tinder has always been in ample supply in the United States especially at times of social and economic change. What has saved us from the most destructive blazes has been the restraint of most politicians. They have refrained from pouring on the accelerant and casually flicking a lighted match on the combustible mix.

Trump somehow managed to create the illusion that his was nothing more than straight talk, spoken in a manner refreshingly different from the convoluted political jargon of conventional politicians. But what came his mouth were more nearly what the Supreme Court unanimously declared in 1942 to be"fighting words" — words not worthy of protection even by the generous terms of the First Amendment because they incite people to violence.

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Trump's words are out there and they cannot be called back. Worse yet, he continues to utter them, intoxicated by the keyboard courage of an addicted social media user.

It is impossible to predict how many more Charlottesvilles are in the offing. It is possible that even if the president abandons his craven refusal to differentiate aggressor from victim, his words have become a conflagration that cannot easily be extinguished. As Thomas Jefferson, who lived just up the road from Charlottesville, wrote on another explosive matter, slavery, "This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night awakened me and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the Union."

Our president's unwillingness or inability to make critical moral decisions may also signal a blaze of unimagined destructiveness.

Ross K. Baker is a distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @Rosbake1

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