Specifically, the talk focused on issues related to race, including Trump’s comments in the aftermath of the events in Charlottesville, Va.

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. hosted a high-powered panel at this week’s Hutchins Forum on Martha’s Vineyard, and the topic was — you guessed it — President Trump .

The forum, moderated by veteran PBS journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, featured New York Times columnist Charles Blow, WBUR reporter Asma Khalid, former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, professor Leah Wright Rigueur of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, CNN political analyst April Ryan, and Republican commentator and businessman Armstrong Williams. ( Barack Obama is on the island at the moment, but the former president was not at the Hutchins Forum.)


Blow said the president’s equivocation about neo-Nazis was abhorrent but hardly surprising. He faulted conservatives in the Republican Party for overlooking Trump’s “cheerleading of the birther lie,” a reference to Trump’s role in perpetuating the false notion that Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

“It seems to me [Republicans] want the policies without the poison, and you can’t have that,” Blow said. “You can’t accommodate bigots and then say you’re not part of that bigotry.”

Dershowitz said he had been ambivalent about removing Confederate statues — “I don’t like rewriting history” — but when Trump used the term “culture” in his post-Charlottesville remarks, he was persuaded they needed to go. Statues glorifying the Confederacy should be moved to museums, Dershowitz said, “where they can be seen in historical context and understood.”

Asked if he agreed, Blow did an epic eye-roll and said, “You can put them wherever you want,” which elicited snickers from the crowd at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown.

Dershowitz sounded sanguine despite the president’s comments about Charlottesville.

“I believe the near universal condemnation of what President Trump has said and done has been louder than the voice of the president himself, and that’s rare thing,” he said.