Do you think it’s just a coincidence that bombs are sent to former President Barack Obama, to Hillary Clinton, to liberal philanthropist George Soros, to the New York office of CNN and to others during a week when President Donald Trump has been ratcheting up his race-based, fear-mongering conspiracy theories and calling himself a “nationalist?”

Trump feigns ignorance about the word, but he must know it rings like a dog whistle in the ears of every white supremacist and racist in the country, if not the world.

An article in the Nation pointed out how “white nationalists applauded Trump’s rhetorical turn.”

Words, too, can be explosive

Add to that the president’s wild claims about the immigrant caravan south of the border, saying that within the refugee families “’you’re going to find MS-13, you’re going to find Middle Eastern, you’re going to find everything.”

Trump later admitted there was no evidence to prove the claim.

This is after Trump has repeatedly called the media the “enemy of the people.” After he went soft on the supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville. After he exhorted audience members at his rallies to rough up protesters in the crowd.

Trump says he doesn’t believe the term “nationalist” is code for “white nationalist.”

He told a reporter, "I've never heard that theory about being a nationalist. I've heard them all.”

Remember Steve Bannon?

If that’s so, if Trump has “heard them all,” then he has heard what his former White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, has had to say about it.

It was Bannon who first embraced the “nationalist” term. Others around Trump must have told him about the inherent racist implications now associated with the word.

Bannon speaks to right-wing organizations about his philosophy. He told a group in France, "Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativist. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker."

Needing a president, not a nationalist

Remember what the late Sen. John McCain said about this?

He said, “Half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

There’s really only one person in the country who can begin to tamp down the division and the hostilities that can lead criminals on the margins to act out their hatred in a way that goes beyond rhetoric to violence. You know who he is.

All he needs to do is stop calling himself a “nationalist” and start acting like what we need him to be: A president.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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