Three days after blithely refusing to condemn white supremacists who murdered a woman by running her over with a car, and one day after issuing a halfhearted follow-up after some bewildered White House staffer told him that a key part of being President of the United States is saying that Nazis are bad, Donald Trump trotted out for a press conference this afternoon and angrily ripped this fragile, clumsy, multi-part response to shreds.

I've watched a lot of the president's press conferences these last few months. This is the worst of the lot, and it isn't close. When asked about the "alt-right" groups that congregated to celebrate white supremacy in Charlottesville, Trump indignantly invoked the culpability of the club-wielding, bat-carrying, helmet-wearing "alt-left" in all of this. "What about the alt-left who came charging at the alt-right?" the president asked. "Do they have any semblance of guilt?" He characterized Friday night's torch-wielding goons as people protesting "very quietly." He noted multiple times that the men walking the streets chanting "Blood and Soil!" had a permit, whereas the counterprotesters did not. Yes, in the year of our Lord 2017, the President of the United States shrugged his shoulders at hate-motivated violence and suggested that the real problem is that Americans repudiating Nazism should have registered with the city first.

There is another side. There was a group on this side—you can call them the left, you just called them the left—that came violently attacking the other group. You can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.

It's tempting to label this episode as some variety of "crazy," or "insane," or "deranged," or any of the other hyperbolic words we often wryly employ to explain away disturbing behavior we don't fully understand. Not now, though. Donald Trump snapped on Tuesday, revealing himself to be a deeply angry, bitter, and broken man who endured 72 hours of blistering criticism and then finally decided, Fuck this and fuck you and fuck everyone, I'm going to say exactly what I think. It was a cartoonishly disgraceful display of cowardice from a spiritually tiny person, and yet the implications of his inflammatory rhetoric for the future of this country, at a time when gleeful white supremacists are more emboldened than they've felt in decades, are too frightening to earn even the grimmest and most nihilistic of chuckles.

The garish mask that this president wears to hide his fear, his ineptitude, and his crippling mediocrity has been wearing increasingly thin of late, held delicately together by an endless stream of "clarifying statements" issued from his circle of apologists after each progressively more unsettling day. This was its grand undoing, and although it might get stitched together eventually—Donald Trump has certainly wriggled his way out of a pickle before—we saw him today for who he really is, even if only for a few minutes: a trapped, wounded animal who senses his nascent presidency already slipping from his grasp, and who will say and do anything to hold onto it.

This country is in the midst of a national emergency, and for so long as the White House's occupant is willing to offer a full-throated defense of people proudly marching under swastikas, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

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