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"Racism is evil -- and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans," Trump said. "Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America."

Which is good and right. But, let's be wary of giving Trump too much credit for saying, essentially, racism is bad. In fact, a closer look at Trump's words reveal three mistakes he made even in trying to clean up his comments from Saturday.

With scenes of Nazi flags waving and a car driven by a white supremacist allegedly being plowed on purpose into a group of counter-protesters, Trump delivered a speech in which he blamed "many sides" for the violence in Charlottesville. He also pre-emptively absolved himself of blame by insisting these sorts of incidents happened when Barack Obama was president, too.

Then, for the next 36 hours, he -- the most talkative (or tweet-ative) politician in the country -- went silent. His White House released a statement from an anonymous official insisting that of course Trump meant to condemn white supremacists. Even if he didn't, you know, say it.

But, that's the point. He didn't say it. It matters how you act in moments when the whole country -- and the whole world -- are watching. Do-overs aren't really a thing in politics -- particularly in a situation so fraught as the one in Charlottesville and with a politician with as spotty a record as Trump on condemning intolerance.

That Trump's instincts -- and those of his White House -- were so off at the start of all of this speaks to a deep misunderstanding of what the role of president is and should be. Leaders lead in moments when the country turns to them. That moment was Saturday. Today feels like a half-hearted attempt to step into the leadership void Trump himself created.

When Trump spoke about Charlottesville on Saturday, it was clear that he had shoe-horned a few paragraphs about it into a speech he was already planning to give about all of the great things that were happening in the country under his leadership. It felt off for the moment. What was required was a simple formula: Sympathy for the victims, condemnation for the attackers, the end.

And yet, Trump repeated that mistake Monday. He opened his remarks with this:

"Our economy is now strong. The stock market continues to hit record highs, unemployment is at a 16-year low and businesses are more optimistic than ever before. Companies are moving back to the United States and bringing many thousands of jobs with them. We have already created over one million jobs since I took office."

Why? Because it's against Trump's nature to acknowledge -- even without acknowledging it -- that he may have done something less than perfectly the first time around. So, he touts his unrelated accomplishments before he gets to what he should have said two days earlier. It's his little way of asserting himself amid what he undoubtedly believes is trumped-up overreaction to his initial remarks on Saturday.

Per No. 2, Trump almost certainly didn't feel like he needed to give the follow-up remarks that he gave Monday because he had already said it just fine on Saturday. This phrase captures that frustration. I already said all of this, Trump is saying, but I will say it again because, well, someone(s) told me I have to.

It suggests that Trump doesn't really understand the shortcomings of his first statement on Charlottesville and believes this is all just a bow to the news cycle rather than a moral imperative to speak out clearly against hate and evil.

Which bodes poorly for his ability to handle the next incident -- and, sadly, we know there will be a next incident -- any better.

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3 big mistakes Donald Trump made in his 2nd speech on Charlottesville - CNN

The African-American chief executive of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. Inc. resigned from President Donald Trumps American Manufacturing Council Monday after the commander-in-chief failed to condemn white nationalists for deadly violence at a weekend rally in Charlottesville, Va.

Our countrys strength stems from its diversity and the contributions made by men and women of different faiths, faces, sexual orientations and political beliefs. Americas leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal, Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier said in a statement announcing his departure from the council.

As CEO of Merck and as a matter of personal conscience, I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism, Frazier added.

Less than an hour after Merck released Frazier's statement, Trump slammed the exec in a tweet.

Now that Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma has resigned from President's Manufacturing Council, he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES! Trump posted.

Fraziers resignation came after Trump sparked a national backlash Saturday by suggesting that many sides were to blame for violence during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

One person was killed and more than 19 others were injured during protests at the rally after a car plowed through a group of counter-protesters who were demonstrating against racism.

Trump, in Saturday remarks from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, said, We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides."

He added that hate and division in the country must stop, but that it is not linked to his presidency because it has "been going on for a long, long time."

"No matter our color, creed, religion, our political party, we are all Americans first," he said, adding that he'd like for his administration to "study" why such violence is occurring. He didn't take questions from reporters.

Asked for clarification, a White House official later said: "The President was condemning hatred, bigotry and violence from all sources and all sides. There was violence between protesters and counter protesters today." Vice President Mike Pence told NBC News that the president "stated clearly that he condemns hate and violence in all of its forms."

After Trump's statement Saturday, many Republicans and Democrats criticized Trump for failing to single out white nationalists for the violence, and on Monday, the president addressed the situation with stronger language.

Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans, Trump said in a brief statement from the White House.

Shares of Merck were unfazed by Frazier's announcement to leave the manufacturing council and actually rose 0.7 percent to $62.80 Monday their best day since July 27.

Frazier, however, was not the first to quit the panel. In June, Tesla CEO Elon Musk quit Trump's manufacturing council and Trump's business advisory council after the president withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger also resigned in June from Trump's business advisory council after the president announced his Paris accord decision.

Meanwhile, pressure from social media users mounted on the remaining members of Trump's manufacturing council a body that includes CEOs from more than two dozen corporate giants like Ford Motor Co., Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Under Armour to respond to Trump's comments about Charlottesville.

But at least one other member of Trump's manufacturing council said he would remain on the panel.

"GE has no tolerance for hate, bigotry or racism, and we strongly condemn the violent extremism in Charlottesville over the weekend. GE is a proudly inclusive company with employees who represent all religions, nationalities, sexual orientations and races," GE, whose Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt is on Trump's manufacturing council, said in a statement. "With more than 100,000 employees in the United States, it is important for GE to participate in the discussion on how to drive growth and productivity in the U.S., therefore, Jeff Immelt will remain on the Presidential Committee on American Manufacturing."

Dow Chemcial CEO Andrew Liveris said in his own statement that, "I condemn the violence this weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, and my thoughts and prayers are with those who lost loved ones and with the people of Virginia."

"In Dow there is no room for hatred, racism, or bigotry. Dow will continue to work to strengthen the social and economic fabric of the communities where it operates including supporting policies that help create employment opportunities in manufacturing and rebuild the American workforce," Liveris added.

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Merck CEO Quits Advisory Council Over Trump's Charlottesville Remarks - NBCNews.com

A few weeks ago, I noted President Trumps shaky command of the presidential levers of power, including the bully pulpit: among other things, Trump cannot give a speech without his hosts distancing themselves fromhis rhetoric. Things have actually worsened over the past week, something I didnt think possible.

Consider Trumps three biggest rhetorical own-goals over the past week. His fire and fury statement on North Korea forced Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to try to talk the United States off a ledge. This in turn led to Sebastian Gorka denigrating Tillersonand Trump saying he had perhaps been too soft in his rhetoric. Which, in turn, caused Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to try to talk the nation off a ledgeagain. The point is, professional diplomats are pretty freaked outabout the presidents hyperbolic rhetoric.

Trumps belated response to Russian President Vladimir Putins ejection of U.S. diplomats was even worse:

The public calumny from that reaction was so bad that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had to claim that Trump was being sarcastic.

Finally, to cap off a week of rhetorical miscues, Trump attempted to address the violence triggered by white nationalists in Charlottesville with a namby-pamby statement that blamed many sides for the violence. It is odd that a president who claimed to despise political correctness with respect to Islamic terrorists suddenly chose to be circumspect in describing homegrown neo-Nazi terrorists.

It is safe to say that Trumps response did not go down well at all with the commentariat. As my Post colleague Michael Gerson noted, Trumps reaction toevents in Charlottesvillewas alternately trite (come together as one), infantile (very, very sad) and meaningless (we want to study it).

SoundingPresidential 101 is not complicated:

Trump has failed and failed spectacularly at rudimentary rhetoric. Why?

To understand Trumps own-goals, you have to remember that there really is an art to being a politician. Say what you will about politicians as a group, but it is striking how all of them, from Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz, knew the right thing to say in response to Charlottesville. Running for office repeatedly tends to hone ones rhetorical instincts. At a minimum, most professional politicians learn the dos and donts of political rhetoric.

Trumps political education hasdifferent roots. He has learned the art of political rhetoric from three sources: reality television, Twitter and the shows. His miscues this past week can be traced to the pathologies inherent in each of these arenas.

I have not watched muchreality television, but I have seen just enough of the Real Housewives franchise to know that this genre thrives on next-level drama. No one wants to watch conflicts being resolved; they want to watch conflicts spiral out of control. So it is with Trump and North Korea. He never sees the value in de-escalating anything, and North Korea is no exception. Calm resolution is not in the grammar of reality television. No wonder Trump never speaks that way; it is a register he cannot comprehend.

I am pretty familiar with Twitter,and the thing about that medium is that it is drenched insarcasm. It is a necessary rhetorical ticto thrive in that place. The problem is that while sarcasm might work on political Twitter, it rarely works in politics off Twitter. Sarcasm requires that observers be able to discern the hidden meaning behind a persons words. When it comes to politics, most people miss the text; expecting them to catch the subtext is insane. So it is not surprising that some of Trumps worstrhetorical misstepscome during lame attempts at sarcasm.

Finally, there are the political talk shows.If there is one thing Trump has learned from that genre, it is the both sides hot take. Pundits are so adept at blaming a political conflict on both sides that the #bothsides hashtag is omnipresent on political Twitter.

Of course, the #bothsides trope is commonly used when discussing Democrats and Republicans, or Congress and the presidency. As a general rule, any conflict in which one side is dominated by neo-Nazis is not a #bothsides moment. Even CNNs Chris Cillizza, the king of the Savvy Washington Take, knows this:

Both sides dont scream racist and anti-Semitic things at people with whom they disagree. They dont base a belief system on the superiority of one race over others. They dont get into fistfights with people who dont see things their way. They dont create chaos and leave a trail of injured behind them.

Arguing that both sides do it deeply misunderstands the hate and intolerance at the core of this Unite the Right rally. These people are bigots. They are hate-filled. This is not just a protest where things, unfortunately, got violent. Violence sits at the heart of their warped belief system.

Trying to fit these hatemongers into the political/ideological spectrum which appears to be what Trump is doing speaks to his failure to grasp whats at play here. This is not a conservatives say this, liberals say that sort of situation. We all should stand against this sort of violent intolerance and work to eradicate it from our society whether Democrat, Republican, Independent or not political in the least.

Deep down, there are substantive problems with Trumps reaction to each of these three crises. He seems overly eager to escalate tensions with North Korea and steadfastly does not want to call out Vladimir Putin or white nationalists by name.

What makes Trumps presidency worse, however, is his limited grasp of the bully pulpit. He ad-libbed all these rhetorical miscues. In doing so, he relied on tropes he had learned from reality television, social media and political talk shows.

Those tropes might work for a reality-show hack desperate to engage in self-promotion. They do not work for the president of the United States.

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Why is Donald Trump so bad at the bully pulpit? - Washington Post

In the coming days and weeks, Trump will undoubtedly take pains to clean up the mess he left on Saturday. He will get on script and echo the sentiment belatedly tweeted by his daughter, Ivanka, on Sunday: There should be no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis. He may even symbolically purge his administration of some of its leading white supremacists: Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, Kris Kobach. And a lot of people will be fooled. Some will continue to maintain, as Samantha Bloom did on Saturday, that Trumps not a supremacist.

But Trumps foot soldiers will know better. When he veered from his prepared remarks on Saturday, he spoke his real truth. It is no coincidence, as NBCs Benjy Sarlin observed, that Trump tends to interpret any request to condemn hate as a personal attack. Of course he does: It is personal for Trump, just as surely as it is for Spencer or Duke or Bannon. The president is the most powerful hate-monger in America. He is the imperial wizard of the new white supremacy. He is GEOTUS to his followers on 4chan and Daily Stormer: God Emperor of the United States. Its hard to conceive of an acronym that would please this president more.

Before this weekend, the chief form of terror practiced by Trumps white nationalists was online. As Angela Nagle writes in her indispensable book about the alt-right, Kill All Normies:

Multiple journalists and citizens have described in horrifying detail the attacks and threats against those who criticize Trump or figures of the online Trumpian right, especially if the critic is female, black or Jewish, but also if theyre a cuckservative. They now have the ability to send thousands of the most obsessed, unhinged and angry people on the Internet after someone if they dare to speak against the president or his prominent alt-light and alt-right fans.

Trump has long endorsed that form of terror, too, with equally unmistakable signalingnamely, retweeting some of the worst. Hes also sent clear wavelengths not only through his anti-Hispanic hate speech, but with (among other things) his failure to denounce David Duke after his campaign endorsement; his drumbeat of degradation of women like bleeding Megyn Kelly; and, more tangibly, his reorienting the federal governments counter-domestic-terrorism efforts to focus only on Islamic extremism, not white supremacists.

Trump does not merely play footsie with the new white-supremacist movement in America, as Jennifer Rubin wrote in an otherwise blistering condemnation of his moral idiocy at The Washington Post on Sunday. He embodies the movementin his rhetoric, in his actions, and in his person. Just as white people created America and made it great, in the view of the white nationalists, Trump built his business empire all on his own, with no help from his real-estate mogul father. And just like the neo-Naziswho spent Sunday spreading Alex Joness message that Charlottesville was a George Soros conspiracyTrump is always blameless. And if you challenge his paranoid version of truth, he will not engage with you, he will not try to persuade youany more than Spencer or Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin will. He will mock you, and intimidate you. Rhetorical violence is his stock-in-trade.

Perhaps most important, Trumps vision of the world is identical to the apocalyptic fantasies of white genocide peddled by his followers. What, after all, is white supremacy in America in 2017? It is, first and foremost, an expression of delusional self-regard and white male entitlement run riot. It is the insistence that some peoplewhite American malesare inherently better than others, and deserve preferential treatment. To his supporters, and to himself, Donald Trump is the living embodiment of Hitlers concept of Aryan Herrenvolk (Aryan Master Race). He is our first neo-Nazi president. And until we acknowledge that unthinkable truth, and treat Trumps presidency as the anti-democratic crisis that it is, he will not be the last.

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Donald Trump, Neo-Nazi Recruiter-in-Chief - New Republic

Has there ever been a president as humorless as Donald Trump? Doubtful. Trump traffics in bombast, braggadocio and bluntness. He is a master of insults, self-praise, and mangled syntax. But he is no John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan both presidents who were masters of the well-aimed witticism. The current occupant of the Oval Office is only funny unintentionally. He is a joke, but he doesnt make jokes.

Recall his remarks at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York on Oct. 20, 2016. These events are supposed to be a time for political leaders to be light-hearted and to poke fun at themselves. Trump barely managed to get off a couple of ghostwritten one-liners before veering into a cringe-inducing denunciation of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who was sitting right behind him. He went on to accuse Clinton (inaccurately) of being so corrupt, she got kicked off the Watergate Commission, of being hypocritical (Hillary believes that its vital to deceive the people by having one public policy and a totally different policy in private) and, finally, of pretending not to hate Catholics. The audience reacted with boos rather than the more typical laughs.

Yet if you listen to Trump defenders, you would think that he is the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Chris Rock, Amy Schumer and Aziz Ansari, all wrapped up into one rolling-on-the-floor package of hilarity.

Last week, Trump thanked Vladimir Putin for expelling 755 personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow Im very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll, the president said. Most observers interpreted this as further evidence of Trumps toadying to the Russian dictator, who helped him win the presidency. But Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) claimed to detect wit of a high order. Trump, he said, was speaking tongue-in-cheek.

This brand of lame excuse has actually become the go-to explanation for Trumps outrageous remarks. As noted by CNN and the Huffington Post, among others, the presidents apologists often detect unsuspected humor in his offensive and inane comments.

In July, for example, Trump endorsed police brutality, telling a convention of cops please dont be too nice when throwing suspects into the back of a paddy wagon. There was not a trace of a smile on his face as he spoke, nor did anyone laugh (although, disturbingly, a lot of the audience applauded). The next day, as police departments across the country condemned the presidents remarks, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered this defense: I believe he was making a joke.

A year earlier, in July 2016, Trump told the press he hoped Russia would hack and release private emails from Hillary Clintons private server: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer later claimed, He was joking at the time. We all know that. We do?

Trumps humor apparently extended to telling then-FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating fired National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Comey testified to Congress under oath that the president told him: I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. Hes a good guy. I hope you can let this go. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), a member of the House Oversight Committee, tried to excuse what looks very much like obstruction of justice by claiming that Trump was just kidding it looks different on paper. The punchline, of course, was that Trump fired Comey for ignoring his instructions.

Trump himself has embraced the I was joshing defense. In August 2016 he claimed that President Obama was the founder of ISIS, and refused to back down when questioned about that ludicrous claim by radio host Hugh Hewitt. But later Trump explained that he had been kidding. So, too, in January 2016 he claimed was just kidding when he said that global warming was a Chinese hoax a claim he had first made in 2012 and repeated many times without a hint of levity.

Trump also hides behind the cloak of humor when demeaning those around him. At a lunch with the Security Council, Trump solicited views of his U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley: Does everybody like Nikki? Otherwise she can easily be replaced. Ha ha, from a man notorious for actually firing aides right and left.

This kidding/not kidding routine is a way for Trump to preserve a shred of plausible deniability and for his spokesmen to walk away from his crazier comments. But if you think Trump isnt being serious, the jokes on you. Trump would actually be a little easier to take if he had a modicum of wit. But he doesnt. Hes about as funny as that notorious cutup Calvin Coolidge.

Max Boot is a contributing writer to Opinion and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Did you hear the one about Donald Trump? - Los Angeles Times