Translating Yesterday’s Trump Presser

Let’s take a look at those dog whistles.

Trump’s press conference was both in line with everything he has said and done until now. It was blunt depiction of just how little the president is tied to truth, justice, morality, or even basic decency. In short, after moving from “many sides” to a tepid condemnation of white supremacy, he finally came down firmly on the side of Confederate apologists.

I assume most readers didn’t need to read or listen past “Jews will not replace us!” to condemn the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. But as much as we’d like to say “Nobody can support him now!” at least 30 to 35 percent of the United States came away from that press conference thinking that the President successfully fended off the attacks of the nasty Fake News, condemned the violence of the “alt-left” in a way the mainstream media couldn’t or wouldn’t, and defended historical integrity against revisionism and erasure.

But aside from some of his more explicit statements, Trump offered a lot of dog whistles to reassure his loyal cadre of rabid whites. Here are some of the shrillest, with translations (marked with ☞).

• Here’s the thing. When I make a statement, I like to be correct. I want the facts.
  ☞ Justify my delays through selective memory. Forget everything that happened before today.
• I hear she was a fine, really actually an incredible young woman. But her mother on Twitter thanked me for what I said.
  ☞ I, the President of the United States, need the grieving mother of a murdered child to soothe my ego after attacks by the nasty media.
• In fact, everybody said [my first] statement was beautiful.
  ☞ Daily Stormer, Richard Spencer, David Duke comprise a representative sample.
• The second statement was made with knowledge, with great knowledge.
  ☞ Knowledge that this is almost literally the very least I could do.
• But we’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon, but he’s a good person and I think the press treats him frankly very unfairly.
  ☞ Dare me to fire him and I’ll keep him; dare me to keep him on and I’ll fire him.
• You mean Senator McCain who voted against us getting good health care?
  ☞ Still trying to reach that shiv McCain stuck in my back.
• Wait a minute. I’m not finished. I’m not finished, fake news.
  ☞ Remember that thing I retweeted about the train hitting the reporter?
• You had a group, you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent.
  ☞ ANTIFA! FEAR ANTIFA, MIDDLE AMERICA!
• So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?
  ☞ Moral judgment is leftist thought police. Both North and South fought to preserve the Union. Children with liberal arts degrees hate America and are coming to destroy your heroes.
• I would say that’s up to a local town, community, or the federal government, depending on where it is located.
  ☞ We’ll make a federal case out of it if we have to.
• They’ve been frayed for a long time, and you can ask President Obama about that because he’d make speeches about it.
  ☞ Though his fancy speeches didn’t stop me getting elected, did they?
• They want great jobs with good pay and, when they have that, you watch how race relations will be.
  ☞ This racism thing is just what white people do when they’re bored, like cornhole.
• I think there’s blame on both sides and I have no doubt about it and you don’t have any doubt about it either and- and- and- and if you reported it accurately, you would say it.
  ☞ Trust your gut feeling that both sides must have been equally as bad.
• You have some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
  ☞ Ignore the swastikas and the confederate flags; all the high school civics teachers concerned with accurate depictions of history were off-camera.
• You’re changing history. You’re changing culture and you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned, totally.
  ☞ Acknowledging the apartheid past of the South is Stalinist thought policing.
• No, I’ll be reaching out. I’ll be reaching out.
  ☞ I won’t be reaching out.

Andrew Leber is based in Boston.