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Did anyone expect President Donald J. Trump to wax eloquent and consoling with regard to Charlottesville? Did we really think he would condemn the torch-bearing white supremacists who assembled there? Do a majority of Americans count on Trump to provide wisdom, guidance and inspiration in times of trouble?

No. No. And no.

Handed an opportunity to shock us with a display of principled leadership, Trump on Saturday could have distanced himself from the alt-right and white nationalists he empowered with his Make America Great Again campaign. But he did not come close to that. He never uttered any of the descriptors we use for people who carry Confederate flags and chant, Jews will not replace us.

Instead, he blamed many sides for the violence that erupted in Charlottesville.

Many sides presents a false equivalence, putting neo-Nazis on the same footing as those who stand against them.

Trump, a quick-trigger when it comes to assigning blame radical Islamic terrorists, bad hombres, crooked Hillary, Mitch McConnell just could not bring himself to condemn the racists who marched on Charlottesville. He did not name names, as he usually does. He did not call out David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard. He did not call out alt-right leader Richard Spencer.

Even before the violence, the president of the United States had a chance to serve his nation well. Friday nights torch parade of young white supremacists as disturbing a tableau as weve seen on the American continent in recent years begged a response.

Again, a condemnation of the assemblage would have been shocking to a lot of us. But it might have neutralized some of Trumps critics.

Instead, he offered a banal tweet about being united against hate and violence.

Lets come together as one! Trump tweeted, and, given the snark and personal attacks we usually see in Trumps tweets, could those words have been any more hollow?

So I go back to my premise: What did we expect? Donald J. Trump is capable of many things bragging about his business acumen and the size of his rally crowds, blasting the media, blaming others for the failings of his presidency but he is never going to unite the country, he is never going to console us. Hes been a divider, not a healer, giving comfort, even inspiration, to the nations bigots.

It is just one of many ways Trump will never measure up to the standards set by his predecessor, the African-American man whose birth as a U.S. citizen Trump infamously questioned for several years.

Former President Barack Obama many times stepped in front of television cameras to talk the nation through tough times, most of them stemming from gun violence -- the massacre of children and teachers at Newtown; the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman; the slayings of Dallas police officers; the death of Trayvon Martin.

And Obama had cred as consoler-in-chief because of what was in his bones and what was in his heart. He was, and is, a decent, thoughtful man.

Saturday night, Obamas offering on Charlottesville was a three-part tweet quoting Nelson Mandela: No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion. . . . People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. . . . For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

Had he still been president, would Obama have condemned the racists who marched on Charlottesville? I think he would have, and he probably would have done so with a forgiving grace the neo-Nazis who hate him do not deserve.

Trump, on the other hand, just does not have what it takes to move the nation to a higher level of civic virtue, unity and respect. He never offered to be such a man during his campaign, and we should not expect that now. He is what he is, nothing more.

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What do we expect from Trump? He's the opposite of Obama. - Baltimore Sun (blog)

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First Lady Melania Trumps response to the violence in Charlottesville, Va., being copied from words spoken by former First Lady Michelle Obama is an unproven claim. A meme is circulating social media positing that Trump again copied words from Michelle Obama while denouncing violence in Charlottesville. However, that claim is likely a spoof.

Where did this meme originate? On Aug. 12, 2017, Trump publicly responded to violent events that had taken place earlier that day at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville by tweeting the following. Our country encourages freedom of speech, but lets communicate w/o hate in our heart, Trump wrote. No good comes from violence.

Trump previously was met with criticism for delivering a speech before the Republican National Convention which included passages identical in content and specific phrasing to an address given before the Democratic National Convention in 2008 by Michelle Obama.

As a result, a good number of spoof items were posted online that played on the idea of various prominent political figures plagiarizing each others words.

Now, social media users are debating whether Trump once again stole words from Obama. Shortly after Trumps Twitter response, an image began circulating online alleging that Trump had likewise taken those words without credit from a comment made by Obama over a year earlier.

However, Snopes is reporting that the above meme is most likely a spoof. While not being able to completely rule out the possibility that Obama might at some time have expressed something like the thought attributed to her here, there is no record of her having done so.

Here are some examples of people discussing the meme on social media.

Rather, the above meme is most likely having fun at an earlier controversy involving Trump and Obama and the current crisis facing the country and President Donald Trumps administration.

White nationalists had assembled in Charlottesville to vent their frustration against the citys plans to take down a statue of Confederal Gen. Robert E. Lee. Counter-protesters massed in opposition. A few hours after violent encounters between the two groups, a car drove into a crowd of people peacefully protesting the rally. The driver was later taken into custody.

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What did you think of the meme alleging plagiarism by Trump? Did you believe it or see evidence to support the memes claim? Let us know in the comments section.

Photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group, Flickr

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Did Melania Trump Criticism Of Charlottesville Violence Actually Plagiarize Michelle Obama? - Business 2 Community

Lexington Herald Leader

Rand Paul pledges support for Mitch McConnell a day after Trump's attacks Lexington Herald Leader U.S. Sen. Rand Paul said Mitch McConnell still has his full support a day after President Donald Trump vented his displeasure with the Senate majority leader several times. Paul, R-Bowling Green, said Trump directed his anger at the wrong person when ... Opinion: Republican Party at critical crossroadsHickory Daily Record Kaiser Health Tracking Poll August 2017: The Politics of ACA Repeal and Replace EffortsKaiser Family Foundation all 575 news articles »

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Rand Paul pledges support for Mitch McConnell a day after Trump's attacks - Lexington Herald Leader

Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House on July 31, 2017. (AP Photo / Pablo Martinez)

Republicans used to recognize the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil. The partys great moral champion in the moment when it became the political tribune for a wave of 19th-century abolitionist sentiment, Pennsylvania Senator Thaddeus Stevens, proclaimed, I can never acknowledge the right of slavery. I will bow down to no deity however worshipped by professing Christianshowever dignified by the name of the Goddess of Liberty, whose footstool is the crushed necks of the groaning millions, and who rejoices in the resoundings of the tyrants lash, and the cries of his tortured victims.

That is the language that Republicans once spoke.

But Americans have not heard any echoes of that language in the awful response of Donald Trump to the racist terror that has rocked Charlottesville, Virginia.

When white nationalists marched with the flag of the slaveholders that Stevens and his comrades vanquished more than a century and a half ago, when these so-called neo-Confederates unleashed hatred and violence in Charlottesville, the Republican president of the United States attempted to equate their infamy with the principled resistance to racism and xenophobia.

I should put out a comment as to whats going on in Charlottesville, said the president, who then proceeded to announce that We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.

Trump then sought to absolve himself of any responsibility by noting that this hatred, bigotry, and violencewhich has flared so horrifically since last years presidential electionhas been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. A long, long time.

Trumps final observation was correct: the American crisis is not new. Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old Charlottesville paralegal who died Saturday after a car driven by a man linked with the white supremacists plowed into a crowd of peaceful antiracism demonstrators, was certainly not the first supporter of equality to be murdered in this country.

But to equate the champions of equal justice under law with the vile racists who march beneath the banners of slaveholders and segregationists is beyond defense.

At a moment when the country needed a president to speak with moral authority, Trump failed the test. Miserably.

The only question that remains involves his fellow Republicans. Will they finally put principle above party and reject this pathetic excuse for a president?

The great name of the Republican Party has already been dragged through the mud not just by Donald Trump but by every Republican who has to this point facilitated his presidency.

As Trump exploits and extends resentment for purposes of politics and self-aggrandizement, he affronts the legacy of the party of Abraham Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens. He cannot help himself, or his party, or his country. But Donald Trump is not the whole of the Republican Party. Not yet.

Other Republicans still have an opportunity to reject the destructive politics that the president is employing, a politics that is rapidly turning the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump. This will only happen, however, if they have the courage to make an explicit and unapologetic break with their president.

It is not enough that House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, and senior Republicans such as Arizona Senator John McCain have issued more responsible statements than did Trump. They have a duty to condemn a Republican president who had done everything in his power to divide the country, and who is now making things much, much worse.

The burden rests heaviest on Paul Ryans shoulders. He is right to say that White supremacy is a scourge. This hate and its terrorism must be confronted and defeated. But the speaker must understand that confronting and defeating slaveholders, segregationists, neo-Confederates, and alt-right haters has always required the moral clarity that Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens mustered in the partys founding time.

Donald Trumps crudely constructed and crudely stated arguments for moral equivalency are an affront to the long legacy of the Republican Party, and to human decency. If Ryan and other leading Republicans fail to confront Trump, if they will not hold their president to account, they are facilitating his heresyand the damage to society that extends from a Republican president who governs with no sense of history, and no sense of honor.

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Trump Blamed the Violence in Charlottesville 'On Many Sides.' Republicans Must Reject That. - The Nation.

President Trump made two big political decisions over past half-week, and both are already proving disasters.

The first decision was to cut himself loose from the Republican leadership in Congress. Trump blasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with a sequence of tweets fixing blame on McConnelland thereby absolving himselffor the failure of Obamacare repeal.

The second decision was to issue a statement condemning many sides for the confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekendand adhering to that policy of pandering to white nationalism even after the ramming death of a counter-protester and the injury of many more.

Trump had wanted to stand apart from Republicans in Congressand they have now obliged him. Former campaign rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio; Senator Cory Gardner, who heads the Senate Republican campaign organization; President Pro Tempore of the Senate Orrin Hatchall issued statements implicitly criticizing Trumps for its even-handedness between perpetrators and targets.

Its always hazardous to overthink the strategy behind Trumps words or actions. Oftentimes the president simply reacts with impulsive emotionalism to events. Yet there are plausible reasons for him to distance himself from the Senate Republicans now. A president normally needs Congress to enact his agenda. This president, however, does not have much of a legislative agenda. Instead, he has submitted to the policy agenda of Congressand that agenda is, if possible, even less popular than he is. Trump will be far better off going to the nation in 2020 not having removed Medicaid coverage from millions of red state voters, not having shoved through a huge upper-income tax cut financed by stringent domestic budget cuts, than he would be running on that record.

What Trump needs most for 2020 is an excuse, and a plausible enemy. Complaints about Democratic obstruction and partisan Russia witch hunts sound absurd when Republicans control both houses of Congress. Lose even one chamber, however, and suddenly those talking points acquire some plausibility, at least in the ears of Trump-inclined voters. And even if blaming Congress does not reflect a deliberate strategic calculationwith this president, its difficult to conclude that anything doesit could be regarded as working to his advantage. The Trump base is much more clearly defined by its cultural resentments than by any policy program: sacrificing the program to enflame the resentments may well appear to the embattled Trump White House as the least bad survival option.

Until Charlottesville.

Trump supporters often invoke the presidents supposed mandate from the people. Heres what Kellyanne Conway told Andrea Mitchell just last weekend:

Republican consultants ... totally missed what was happening in America. That the forgotten man and forgotten woman, many of whom had voted for Democrats in the past, many of whom had never voted, or never voted in decade, came forth and made this new Trump coalition in a way thatin a way that frankly, respectfully, the last couple of Republican candidates did not.

Trump aides say such things so often that they themselves may have lost sight of how untrue they are. Trump not only lost the popular vote in 2016, but he won a smaller share than Mitt Romney in 2012, and only 0.3 percent more than John McCain in the disastrous year 2008. (The tallies stand at 45.93 percent for Trump vs. 45.6% percent for McCain) With barely one-third of the U.S. public approving his presidency in the last pre-Charlottesville polls, Trumps presidency has sunk to the lowest level of popularity ever recorded in a presidents first year.

The Trump team may be trying to replay Bill Clintons triangulation of 1995-96, when Clinton won re-election by positioning himself as a moderate centrist between the extremes of the congressional Republicans and congressional Democrats. And maybe Trump could have executed a blue-collar version of that strategy by joining cultural conservatism to a free-spending populism of infrastructure spending and the defense of Medicare and Medicaid. Instead hes positioned himself in such a way that other political actors can triangulate against him: congressional Republicans, by rejecting Trumps indulgence of murderous racism; congressional Democrats, by fastening Trump to the widely disliked Ryan-McConnell policy agenda.

Its probably impossible for a man of Trumps psychology to process how much legal jeopardy he and his family may be inand how utterly he depends on Republicans in Congress to shield him. President Bill Clinton faced down scandal politics in his second term because his party united to support him, a decision politically vindicated by the strong Democratic showing in 1998, the best sixth-year election performance in modern history. Trump, by contrast, is doing his utmost to persuade congressional Republicans that it could well be less disastrous to face the voters in 2020 under Mike Pence than Donald Trump. Pence apparently thinks so, too. Pre-Charlottesville, that remained a tough sale. Post-Charlottesville, things look different.

Trump now stands not between the parties, or above the parties, but beyond the partiesin some strange political twilight zone where neo-Nazis are seen as a constituency not to be insulted. As events shift Trump to that bizarre place, even his one authentic achievement as presidentthe steep reduction in illegal immigrationrisks becoming an anti-achievement. Trump and his white-nationalist advisers seem determined to corroborate their critics accusation that enforcement is concerned not with protecting the wages and working conditions of legal residents of the United Statespart of a pro-worker agenda that also could include a big investment in construction, trust-busting of college tuition, and a defense of existing social-insurance programs but instead as a component of a white-nationalist agenda that also includes attacks on minority voting rights, a rollback of affirmative action, and compliments to authoritarian leaders worldwide.

The conventional wisdom is that dissension is a party killer; safer to stay united around even a low-polling president than to act against him. But what if it is the president who is fomenting the dissension, because his ego requires that every failure be blamed on somebody else? What if the president is polling so low that he splashes his party with his own odium? What if he is branding his entirely flag-waving party with the flags not of the United States but of Russia, the Southern Confederacy, and now amazingly even Nazi Germany? Then, to quote the Moby Dick at Sea" account that seems at every turn to be subtweeting this presidency:

Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat, is still better.

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Time for Republicans to Leap From the Boat - The Atlantic