After a week in which an enthusiast of President Donald Trump sent bombs to his critics and a white supremacist obsessed with what he considered a Jewish-led conspiracy to flood the country with "hostile invaders" murdered 11 Pittsburgh worshipers, all responsible Americans understand the need to dial back incendiary rhetoric that, in an armed-to-the-teeth nation, can convert hate into death.
The president of the United States is not a responsible American.
In prepared statements and on Twitter, Trump has spoken out against anti-Semitism. He has decried political violence.
But soon after these denunciations, he has returned to spouting words and phrases he knows full well exacerbate racial and religious resentment and animate fevered conspiracy theories.
Trump Monday blamed "the Fake News Media," "the true Enemy of the People," for "division and hatred" that, as manifested last week, were clearly more closely connected to his own rabid rhetoric than to anything in the New York Times or on CNN.
He went right back to calling the caravan of Central Americans slowly making their way north _ the vast majority of whom are fleeing violence and miserable economies, and the vast majority of whom will properly be turned back at the U.S.-Mexico border _ "an invasion of our Country."
If Trump wanted to calm the country rather than keeping a small contingent of Americans in a perpetual state of apoplexy, it would be easy.
He would call out those among his allies, including many powerful broadcasters and pundits, who blame George Soros (a Jew) and "globalists" (often code word for Jews) for the caravan.
He would single out white supremacists for a fraction of the scorn he aims at Democrats.
He would say that Soros, Tom Steyer, Hillary Clinton and others who were mailed pipe bombs are decent Americans with whom he disagrees profoundly. Instead, he calls Steyer, a liberal billionaire, "a crazed & stumbling lunatic"; of Soros and Clinton, he laughs along to chants about locking them up.
He would cool it with the "enemy of the people" nonsense.
He doesn't. He won't. He knows exactly what he's doing.
