If Donald Trump had planned to use a “working vacation” at his New Jersey golf club to work on his short game, it was not to be.

The president’s first week on holiday was dominated by the threat of nuclear war with North Korea – a prospect seemingly exacerbated by the “fire and fury” of his own bellicose response – while the second saw Trump ignite the most serious controversy over racism since his election campaign, with Republicans, business leaders, charities, sports stars and artists all denouncing him after he suggested that neo-Nazis whose protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to the death of a 32-year-old woman were morally equivalent to the anti-fascist activists opposing them.



The week ended with the removal of Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist seen by many as the intellectual powerhouse of the sort of populist nationalism Trump had given voice to in his disastrous press conference about Charlottesville. Liberals had called for his firing in the wake of Trump’s remarks. But his departure may have had more to do with Trump’s resentment that Bannon was frequently characterised as what Bob Dylan once called “the brains behind Pa”.



Last weekend

After hundreds of far-right torch-wielding demonstrators marched on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville on Friday night chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” and attacked counter-protesters, the violence ramped up on Saturday at a “Unite the Right” rally called to protest against the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee, culminating in the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer when a car was rammed into a crowd. Two police officers also died when their helicopter, which was monitoring the far-right rally, crashed outside the city.

Trump responded that afternoon with a statement from his golf resort in New Jersey. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides,” he said, repeating for emphasis: “On many sides.” His next statement seemed to be an attempt to deflect blame for the violence away from himself: “It’s been going on for a long time in our country,” he said. “Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.”

Trump’s remarks met immediate condemnation for his failure to specifically condemn white supremacy, with Republicans such as Marco Rubio joining Democrats and media commentators in calling on the president to “describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists”.

Monday

Those who wanted to hear an explicit condemnation of neo-Nazis from the president – including Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, who quit Trump’s business advisory panel in protest – had to wait until Monday, when Trump bowed to the storm of criticism during a brief trip back to the White House, saying: “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” Nevertheless, on his return to Trump Tower in New York for the first time since his inauguration, more than a thousand protesters chanted: “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA”, and “Not my president”. And by the end of the day Frazier was joined by the CEOs of sportswear retailer Under Armour and computer company Intel in abandoning Trump’s American Manufacturing Council.

Tuesday



Trump’s reversal did not last for long. At a press conference at Trump Tower ostensibly about infrastructure, the president soon made it clear that he stood by his Saturday comments and had evidently denounced neo-Nazis on Monday only with reluctance.

“You had people that were very fine people on both sides,” he told the press. “Not all those people were neo-Nazis, not all those people were white supremacists.” Anti-fascist activists, he claimed, “came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs”, summing up: “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent.”

In fact most impartial witnesses agreed the anti-fascists fought back in self-defence. The Guardian’s Jason Wilson, who was there, wrote: “There was violence from some counter-protesters. But most, like Heather Heyer, who was allegedly killed by one of the far-right marchers, were entirely peaceful.”

Trump sided firmly with those who opposed the removal of the Confederate monument. “So this week it’s Robert E Lee,” the president said. “I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” All four men were slaveholders, but only Lee and Jackson rebelled against the US to protect the institution of slavery in the civil war. “You’re changing history. You’re changing culture,” said Trump. In fact many Confederate monuments were put up not in the immediate wake of the civil war but during eras of severe racial tension in the 20th century – and 32 were dedicated in the last 17 years.

One person was pleased with Trump’s words, at least. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke thanked Trump for his “honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM [Black Lives Matter] / Antifa [anti-fascists]”.

Wednesday



But away from the extreme right the response to Trump’s remarks was furious. Senior Republicans lined up to excoriate him, with vice-president Mike Pence one of the few GOP voices to defend the president. “What happened in Charlottesville was a tragedy and the president has been clear on this tragedy and so have I,” Pence said. Far more common was the sentiment expressed by congressman Steve Stivers of Ohio: “I don’t understand what’s so hard about this. White supremacists and Neo-Nazis are evil and shouldn’t be defended.”

As more businesspeople jumped ship from Trump’s business councils, the president tweeted that he had disbanded the bodies, a sharp reversal from his previous claim that “for every CEO that drops out of the Manufacturing Council, I have many to take their place”.

Meanwhile, in an interview he claimed he had thought was off the record, Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, broke with his boss on two key issues, calling the far right whose readership he had courted as editor of Breitbart News a “collection of clowns” and saying of North Korea: “There’s no military solution here, they got us.” He suggested he might consider a deal in which the US removed its troops from the Korean peninsula in exchange for North Korea freezing its nuclear programme – an offer much more generous than anything Pyongyang has demanded. Earlier that day Trump had offered rare praise for Kim Jong-un for making “a very wise and well reasoned decision” in saying he was prepared to watch US actions in the region “a little more” before ordering a planned launch of North Korean missiles aimed at the US territory of Guam.

Thursday



Rather than back down in the face of the torrent of criticism over his Charlottesville remarks, Trump fired off a series of tweets lamenting the removal of “beautiful statues and monuments” commemorating the Confederacy, saying that he was “sad” to see America’s history and culture “ripped apart” by efforts to take down the memorials. He claimed falsely that he had not “said there is moral equivalency between the KKK, neo-Nazis & white supremacists … and people like Ms Heyer”, calling that a “disgusting lie”. “If you look at both sides -- I think there’s blame on both sides,” he had said on Tuesday.

In Charlottesville, Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, gave an emotional and defiant tribute to her daughter in front of 1,200 mourners at a memorial service. “They tried to kill my child to shut her up. But guess what? You just magnified her,” she said.

Business figures continued to peel away from the president, including James Murdoch, the son of media mogul and Trump ally Rupert Murdoch, who said: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.” A third White House panel of business leaders was scrapped. NBA star Kevin Durant joined LeBron James and other sportspeople in slamming the president.

Later that day Trump responded to a terrorist attack in Barcelona that killed 14 people by reviving a debunked anecdote about a US general dipping bullets in pig’s blood to fight Islamic militants more than a hundred years ago.

Friday

The fallout from Trump’s comments continued. Heyer’s mother refused Trump’s offer to speak with her about her daughter’s death, after having seen “an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists”. A university said it was considering revoking one of his honorary degrees. Sixteen members of the president’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities resigned, citing his “hateful rhetoric”, in a letter that spelled out “RESIST” in an acrostic. Charities cancelled events at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida bolthole. Republicans continued to speak out, including 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who amplified an earlier statement in a Facebook post that said: “This is a defining moment for President Trump. But much more than that, it is a moment that will define America in the hearts of our children.” Secretary of state Rex Tillerson condemned hate speech and racism, adding pointedly: “You’re born with a clean slate, with your personal integrity. No one can take it from you. Only you can relinquish it. And you express that integrity every day in so many actions that you may not even think about.”

Amid all these ructions, Bannon was suddenly forced out, with some sources claiming with almost Trumpian chutzpah that he had in fact resigned two weeks ago. By Friday evening he was back at Breitbart and apparently chairing the company’s evening editorial meeting, perhaps even writing the triumphant headline: “‘Populist Hero’ Stephen K Bannon Returns Home to Breitbart.”

Bannon – one of several key figures from the early days of Trump’s White House now out on his ear – pledged he would be “going to war for Trump against his opponents”. But an interview with the Weekly Standard gave a hint of the thorn in the president’s side his former chief strategist might now become: “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else.”

Stay tuned to find out what.

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