Trump will have to come up with more than the placebos and platitudes of his two statements about Charlottesville to show he is not a Nazi. The first statement was worse than none, and the second statement was just boiler plate. I believe that he made his declaration with tongue in cheek. He was reciting formulae and platitudes so banal as to cause no problem for the alt-right, leaving them to believe that “Trumpy had to say something out of Sunday school so as to calm the squeamish, but we know he’s still on our side.”

What could Trump do to make his denunciation of racism and violence credible? He could clear his own house of crypto-Nazis. He could get rid of Steve Bannon, his Ernst Roehm, and Bannon’s minion, Sebastian Gorka, and get rid of Stephen Miller, the Joseph Goebbels of the Trump Whitehouse.

If Trump would rid himself of these and other deplorables his declaration might become credible.