Charlottesville's mayor sees a 'direct line' from Trump's rhetoric to white nationalist violence

(Image credit: CNN/Screenshot)

last updated 14 August 2017

Charlottesville, Virginia, Mayor Mike Signer linked President Trump's campaign rhetoric to the white nationalist violence his city experienced Saturday while speaking in two interviews Sunday.

"I don't want to make this too much about Donald Trump," Signer said in an appearance on CBS, "but he should look in the mirror. I mean, he made a choice in his presidential campaign, the folks around with him, to, you know, go right to the gutter, to play on our worst prejudices. And I think you are seeing a direct line from what happened here this weekend to those choices."

In a conversation with CNN's Jake Tapper, Signer made a similar argument. "Look at the campaign he ran. Look at the intentional courting," Signer told Tapper, "on the one hand, all of these white supremacist, white nationalist groups like that, anti-Semitic groups, and then look on the other hand the repeated failure to step up and condemn, denounce, silence, put to bed, all of those different efforts just like we saw yesterday, and this is not hard."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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