The content of President Donald Trump’s dig at basketball superstar LeBron James might have been standard Trump fare — questioning the intelligence of a prominent African-American who has been critical of him — but the timing of the tweet made it stand out on Friday night.

The post landed almost exactly a year after the deadly clash between white nationalists and Black Lives Matter protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, when the president refused to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis outright.


That moment temporarily left Trump on an island, abandoned by Republicans on the Hill and corporate executives who had previously played nice with the president on his business councils, and was a low-water mark of his presidency — one that, according to presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, “puts him in the dung heap of presidents who are completely insensitive of race in the United States.”

If that proves to be the case in the long run, a year out from Charlottesville tells a different story and is less clear cut. In fact, while Trump hasn’t changed, he’s no longer isolated, and his race and culture wars now pose one of the biggest challenges to Democrats plotting how to win back the House in 2018 and to take on Trump in 2020.

“The big picture is the fizzle,” said Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of the Weekly Standard and a prominent Never Trump conservative. “He’s not in good shape politically, but he’s not in worse shape. Charlottesville didn’t change his numbers. Everything has just become more the way it was.”

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Indeed, the Republicans in Congress who distanced themselves from Trump during the height of the controversy last summer have since embraced the president on tax reform and his Supreme Court selection, Brett Kavanaugh. Many of the executives who walked away from Trump’s business councils have simply taken their hobnobbing behind closed doors: Now they quietly dine with the president at the White House, or with his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner at their Kalorama mansion.

Trump’s poll numbers, while still hitting a ceiling below 50 percent, in the year since Charlottesville have climbed up to a high of 44 percent, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Trump is in high demand as a campaign surrogate among Republican candidates. His supportive gang of Fox News hosts have become more ethno-nationalist in their rhetoric than they were a year ago.

Meanwhile, Trump himself is less constrained than he was after Charlottesville. At his campaign rallies and on Twitter, he has become more unadulterated in his critiques of what he calls the “fake news” media. The advisers who tried to serve as a check on his rash impulses have since left the administration and have been replaced with people more likely to let Trump set his own agenda. And, as he did on Friday, the president has continued to inflame racial tensions — something Democrats and Republicans alike see as fundamental to his power.

With Trump back on his annual working vacation at his Bedminster, New Jersey, country club — the same setting he was in during the Charlottesville crisis — the LeBron tweet served as a reminder that the president has done little to ameliorate that low-water mark of Charlottesville as one of the defining images of his presidency.

“Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon,” Trump tweeted Friday night, about 24 hours into his vacation. “He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!”

The tweet fueled a new round of critics accusing Trump of being racist, and hearkened back to last August, when Trump stubbornly refused to call out the hate groups that had gathered to protest the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, instead making a moral equivalency argument between them and a small group of counterprotesters, and blaming “both sides” for the violence.

“There are certain times in the presidency when you have to stand up to tell the nation who we are as individuals, and to be a moral leader,” Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic former governor of Virginia, said in an interview on Saturday. “He failed at that.” A year after the event itself, McAuliffe said he still believes that the incident would “go down as one of the worst moments of his presidency.”

But in some ways, the experience of Charlottesville, as well as his ability to recover from any short-term crisis, has been empowering for Trump and his allies. Three former aides said the takeaway from Charlottesville is the nihilistic notion that nothing matters except for how things play.

“The lesson of the Trump presidency is that no short-term crisis matters long term,” said one former White House official who worked in the administration last year during the racial crisis.

Another senior former administration official dismissed the entire episode as nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction that shouldn’t have been taken so seriously. “I don’t believe for a second that the president harbors any racist views,” the official said. “It was poorly handled from a press perspective, and he doubles down when he sees the press attacking him.”

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to comment for this story.

Even Trump’s critics admit that it had little effect in the short term. At this point, it is conventional wisdom among them that no single event will ever seal his fate — and that the only impact they might have on him, politically, is in the aggregate.

“It didn’t hurt him, in the contemporary sense,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is planning to preach at the largest black church in Charlottesville on the Aug. 11 anniversary. “Many that claimed moral outrage at the time then found a way to accommodate him shortly after. But I think it hurt him historically. We have to remind people what he said.”

But among Democrats hoping to regain the House this year, or who are angling to take on Trump in 2020, “reminding people what he said” is seen as a dangerous game. Trump is in high demand on the campaign trail, endorsing Republican candidates at rallies where he often continues to exploit the racial divides.

Democratic operatives warned that Trump can use racism as a tool to distract and define his opponents as solely focused on racial minorities — and play the important role in the election of defining what Democrats are even talking about in their own primary.

“We always have an obligation to speak out against racism and racist apologists like Trump,” said Robby Mook, who served as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager. “But the key is to balance that with accountability on his dangerous policies. That’s what’s so hard about running against him.”

It’s where history and the present diverge: What makes him a formidable candidate today is the same trait that could put him on the wrong side when it comes to long-term assessments.

“Charlottesville defined Donald Trump,” said Brinkley. “When he’s in a controversy an hour, people’s memories dissipate. But in the annals of U.S. history, Charlottesville will be seen as this Day-Glo moment when we saw that the president was a bigot.”