Charlottesville, Virginia, is perhaps the smallest city in the country to be home to two U.S. Presidents — both Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe.

Named after Queen Charlotte, the small liberal college town carries a mixed legacy that is largely symbolic of America’s record on race. On Saturday, tensions over that legacy flared when white nationalist terrorists convened on Charlottesville to protest plans to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee.

Gathering at the location of the statue, Emancipation Park — formerly known as Lee Park — early Saturday, the terrorists wore full tactical gear and openly carried rifles, according to the BBC. Local authorities as well as state and federal law permitted their presence.

After violently segregating the park, the terrorists begun chanting the name of their leader — David Duke. Eyewitness accounts described Duke as “grinn[ing] and wav[ing]” while the “almost entirely white” crowd of armed men “cheered him on.”

Meanwhile, reporters trolled President Trump, whom Duke endorsed last February, over the metaphorical wall he’s erected between the bully pulpit and the insatiable media beast he’s become loath to feed after less than seven months in office.

With nuclear tensions between the U.S. and North Korea at an all-time high and his former campaign chairman the subject of a recent early-morning FBI raid, the President has holed himself up for 17 days at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, forcing reporters to stay nine miles away in Bridgewater.

Trump had hoped to lay low and weather the media storm he’s created, coming out on the other side unscathed, as he always has.

This time he might be wrong.

While he barricaded himself in his golf club in New Jersey, Trump’s terrorist supporters barricaded themselves in Emancipation park in Virginia. His election hadn’t provoked the race war they were hoping for, so they were taking matters into their own hands.

The scene nearly boiled over as anti-terrorist and anti-fascist protestors threw bottles of water past the barricaded park entrance, chanting “off our streets, Nazi scum,” and both sides soaked each other in pepper spray. No shots were fired.

Eventually, the governor of Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, stepped in and declared a state of emergency — effectively cancelling the terrorist gathering.

As the national guard attempted to take control of the area surrounding the park, a twenty-year-old domestic terrorist born in Ohio used a Dodge Challenger to plow into a crowd of protestors, killing a young woman and injuring at least 19 others, according to media reports.

According to CNN, the terrorist “is being held on suspicion of second-degree murder, malicious wounding and failure to stop in an accident that resulted in death.”

The FBI quickly opened a civil rights investigation into the attack, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, “the violence and deaths in Charlottesville strike at the heart of American law and justice.”

“When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.”

New York Times White House Correspondents Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman begun their take on the attack by a commenting on a trend I’ve written about previously. Reporting from Bridgewater, New Jersey, the correspondents for the paper of record wrote:

“President Trump is rarely reluctant to express his opinion, but he is often seized by caution when addressing the violence and vitriol of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and alt-right activists, some of whom are his supporters.”

In a piece titled, “Trump’s Remarks on Charlottesville Violence are Criticized as Insufficient,” Thrush and Haberman go on to detail the bipartisan chorus of disapproval that awaited President Trump after he condemned “the egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence, on many sides” in Charlottesville.

Standing in front of a row of American flags as he issued the statement sanctioning the terror attack, Trump waved his hand while repeating the phrase “on many sides,” as if reciting a Jedi mind trick with the power to morally equate the terrorist’s hateful and murderous actions to those of the peaceful protestors.

The reason that Trump, the man who literally accused his predecessor President Obama of founding ISIS, still walks on eggshells when discussing white nationalist terrorism is the same reason he remains tight-lipped when talking about Russia — together they are the strange bedfellows that constitute the skeleton key to his success.

Without the tacit endorsement of Vladimir Putin and the strategically crucial endorsement of David Duke, two of the most despicable human beings alive on the planet Earth today, Trump simply never would have never become President of the United States.

Buried under the landslide of Trump news that consumed the President and forced him to take shelter this week was one key demographic shift, revealing that his refusal to condemn white nationalist terrorism on Saturday was really the last in a string of desperate attempts to refrain from coming across as hostile to the bigoted base that sent him to the White House.

As Trump dips into net-negative approval ratings with non-college educated white voters for the first time during his Presidency, he seems to have finally gone too far — even for Republicans.

Senator Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican who oversees the National Republican Senatorial Committee, tweeted, “Mr. President — we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism.”

So far, the nation appears to agree with Senator Gardner.

Indivisible, a non-profit that coordinates progressive resistance to the Trump agenda issued the following statement on Saturday:

“Tonight and tomorrow, we will join our fellow Americans across the country to hold events to show solidarity with those who bravely stood against the white supremacists in Charlottesville, and for all who stand to lose under the hateful, bigoted agenda they push. We stand indivisible in our commitment against oppression.”

If protests catch fire, the young woman who lost her life in Charlottesville on Saturday may quickly become a martyr, and President Trump might soon discover he’s in for a lot more than he thought he bargained for.