Karen Tumulty: Pittsburgh slaughter was inevitable

A man is helped by police out of the Tree of Life Synagogue. Photo / AP

COMMENT

"This wicked act of mass murder is pure evil, hard to believe, and frankly, something that is unimaginable," US President Donald Trump said of the carnage in a Pittsburgh synagogue where worshipers had gathered to celebrate the dawn of a new life.

Unimaginable? If only that were true. To anyone who has been paying attention, the slaughter that took place at the Tree of Life Synagogue seemed not only imaginable but also inevitable.

It was not inevitable just because anti-Semitic activity, including hate crimes in schools and bomb threats against Jewish institutions, has been soaring - up an unprecedented 57 per cent last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

That is the symptom. The cause is a climate in which the sentiments of white nationalists and other hate groups are no longer suppressed. Hate groups feel emboldened to show their faces in public, as they did when they marched last year in Charlottesville chanting: "Jews will not replace us." That, too, had a deadly result.

But the President insisted there had been moral equivalency between the neo-Nazis and those who protested against them: "There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for the country, but there are two sides to a story."

In the Trump era, people who should be shunned are embraced, and made practically mainstream.

Trump himself has set this tone, going back to the way he campaigned for president in 2016. As my colleague Dana Milbank observed in the closing days of that election season: "Donald Trump and his surrogates have been playing footsie with American neo-Nazis for months: tweeting their memes, retweeting their messages, appearing on their radio shows. After a speech in which Trump warned that Hillary Clinton "meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty" and that "a global power structure" is conspiring against ordinary Americans, the Anti-Defamation League urged Trump to "avoid rhetoric and tropes that historically have been used against Jews'."

None of that, of course, is a license for what happened in Pittsburgh. But it is a dangerous game to play. Now, what Trump claims to have been unimaginable has actually happened on his watch. He is right to denounce an act so vile - but he and others in his party must quit giving hatred the oxygen and sunlight it needs to grow.