So issues like this never came up prior to Trump becoming president? I find that hard to believe.
- Neo-nazis committing violence in Charlottesville with a president who almost refused to condemn them and tempered any hollow condemnation with claims of their being very fine people on both sides;
- The Chief of Staff peddling the quite racist view that the Civil War was a "failure to compromise", implicitly blaming Northern aggression;
- Defense of civil war statues and monuments. Personally I have mixed feelings about this one because you can't erase history no matter how ugly. But that wasn't the point. The point was a rallying cry to the descendants of former slave owners who seem unable to get over the fact that they can't own slaves anymore;
- Puerto Rico basically being abandoned post-Marla. Compare that to the response after the Houston flooding. On its own this may simply be incompetence. It fits a pattern of behaviour however.
More examples:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
The existence of racist acts prior to Trump becoming president is beside the point. The issue is the quantity and nature of events after (compared to before) and how such purveyors of hate and intolerance have been emboldened by the white nationalist-in-chief.
> We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.
This addressed the extreme-right/neo-nazi violence, as well as the increasing violence perpetrated by extreme-left/antifa agitators (which you conveniently ignored). I would hope my president would condemn all political violence equally.
The media took his statement and ran with it, arguing that it somehow supported extreme-right violence. Alt-right people believed them and became emboldened. If the media had focused on the actual political violence and emphasized that all such acts should be condemned, maybe the agitators would have crawled back to their basements.