Donald Trump is a man who with studied nonchalance dropped the Mother of All Bombs on one of the world’s poorest nations. Yet when it came to the frightening events over the weekend in Charlottesville he became apparently tongue-tied. So much so that he couldn’t bring himself to say just two little words: white supremacists. The immediate fallout of this is that if the American far right didn’t feel as emboldened as it had hitherto wished — it certainly does now. Indeed, one infamous neo-Nazi website wasted no time in praising the apprentice-president for his “good” comments: “No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room.” Naturally, it didn’t exactly happen that way. Trump did offer condemnation. Except that he slammed “in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, of bigotry, of violence on many sides, on many sides.” Which, of course, is no condemnation at all. So where does that leave America’s liberal progressives and the Left? With the mother of all battles on their hands, to be blunt. Trump has already declared war on the liberal agenda. This has happened overtly by his proposed ban on transgender military personnel. It has also happened covertly, too. Meaning that since ensconcing himself in the hot seat at the White House — he has surrounded himself with a team that has some dubious credentials at best. Namely, Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka. The former is Trump’s chief strategist and is the architect of the Muslim travel ban. But before his illustrious career as a political innovator — the gentleman was the executive chairman of Breibart News, a well-known far-right US news and opinion website. Indeed, it was only last year the Bannon himself declared it to be “the platform for the alt-right”. As for Gorka, another Breibart alumnus, who now serves as a deputy assistant to the president — this dapper chap, who has been described as being widely disdained within his own field, is said to have ties to anti-Semitic, right-wing groups in Hungary. Thus Americans have an establishment that more or less tells them on a daily basis that they don’t matter. Only white lives do. And only then if these white lives happen to be heterosexual and cisgender to boot. In short, in failing to call out the name of the bigotry and hatred that triumphed over the weekend — President Trump has told the citizenry what they already mostly knew. That Black Lives don’t’ matter. And in doing this, official Washington has absented itself from its own writ. Meaning that the battle is on. War has been declared. And Charlottesville was the first shot of this presidency. The liberals, the progressives and the Left — both in terms of official opposition and civil society — must come together like never before. They may even wish to move a petition to have Trump charged with inciting hatred. For as the popular talk show host John Oliver so brilliantly observed – the United States is a country where previous presidents have had to previously defeat Nazis. Today, we have one who can’t even be bothered condemn them. * Published in Daily Times, August 15th 2017.