US President Donald Trump. Photo/AP
Donald Trump continues to be a disgrace to the US presidency.
His rant last week about meeting North Korea's nuclear missile tests with "fire and fury" was breathtakingly stupid and dangerous.
His tacit backing yesterday for racist Charlottesville protesters whose actions led to the killing of an innocent woman was even more disturbing, because it points to a deep well of prejudice he drew from in his campaign and which is now sustaining him in office.
Anti-racism protester Heather Heyer died after a tense stand-off between her group and marchers brandishing Nazi and Ku Klux Klan symbols who were opposing the removal of a statue of Confederate general and staunch slavery supporter Robert E Lee.
After police forced both sides to disperse, one of the marchers deliberately drove a car into the counter-protesters, killing Heyer, aged 22, and injuring 19 others.
Prosecutors have charged James Alex Fields Jr, a 20-year-old with alleged neo-Nazi links, with second-degree murder.
Trump initially refused to condemn the killing, saying he did not have enough information - despite in the past rushing to blame radical Islamic terrorism for attacks such as the Orlando nightclub attack and the Louvre bombing.
He would only say there was violence "on many sides".
On Tuesday he read a carefully scripted teleprompter statement, condemning "those who spread violence in the name of bigotry".
Yesterday he reverted to type, arguing those he dubbed "alt left" protesters "came charging ... swinging clubs" and that many of the alt right marchers were not Nazis or KKK members, just ordinary people who cared about their history.
Like all great lies, this has a kernel of truth. Protesters on both sides were carrying sticks and video footage shows them beating each other as police failed to separate the groups.
But only one group marched through the university at night carrying KKK-style torches and chanting "You will not replace us", a rallying cry of the white supremacist movement.
Most marchers would probably not identify as Klan members, let alone as Nazis, but the underlying ideology is the same.
Trump's off-the-cuff comments - which sabotaged his own major infrastructure announcement - have appalled many of his fellow Republicans as much as civil rights activists and Democrats.
Senator Orrin Hatch said his brother didn't give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged at home, while former presidential candidate Marco Rubio predicted white supremacy groups would see Trump's even division of blame as a win. Sure enough, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who was one of the protesters in Charlottesville, congratulated Trump for his "honesty and courage".
It is often easy to overstate political problems, especially in this country. Genuine differences mask the fact that most politicians and voters agree on vital issues most of the time. Democracy is built on that consensus.
Trump is attacking those foundations, not just with his recklessness and immaturity, but through his willingness to unleash the ugliest side of human nature for political gain.
His presidency has echoes of Germany in the 1930s which should concern us all.