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I try not to post too much about politics since it can be divisive and I try to have some variety so this isn’t just all Trump/Game of Thrones recaps. Sometimes I do feel the need to speak about what’s going on. I try to save up until the president does something especially outrageous and I’ll think, “This is the big one. I should say something.” Then something even more ridiculous will come out of the White House. I had thought I was beyond shock at what President Trump will say and do until yesterday, when his comments about Charlottesville left me flabbergasted. Then I realized there’s really no floor to his behavior. So I have to speak.

It is absolutely disgraceful that the president of the United States had to have his teeth pulled before specifically disavowing white supremacists and Nazis by name. It should be like a knee-jerk word association game: Someone says “Nazi” and you say “evil.” But no, he had to put a big asterisk next to these white nationalist protestors and even after sane people pointed out that the violence and terror yesterday was the fault of those people, he still had to double down and invoke some fictional moral equivalence between each side.

That press conference yesterday was some of the ugliest presidential behavior I’ve ever seen. He was defensive when he should have been soothing in troubled times. In his statements since Saturday, he also managed to brag about his electoral victory, claim credit for the bustling economy and tell us he owns a winery in Charlottesville. I can’t imagine another president within my lifetime acting like that in the face of national tragedy, when so many people are feeling threatened by this resurgence of hate. He should not need several do-overs to get this right; Nazis are the easiest thing in the world to condemn.

Mr. President, there is no equivalence between the Nazis/white supremacists/KKK and the counter-protesters. On one side you have an ideology that is inseparable from hate, and on the other side is people protesting that hate. Their ideologies are not equivalent and their actions are not equivalent.

Oh, but Trump says the white supremacists had a permit to march, while the counter-protesters did not. So when they were marching with torches and preaching hate against black people and Jewish people, they at least had their paperwork in order. Whew!

Trump also noted there was some good people in that Tiki torch parade and that not all were white supremacists. These people gaze Nazi salutes, chanted Nazi slogans like “blood and soil” and “seig heil,” and wore Nazi symbols. What more proof do you need of their ideology? The entire thing was a show designed to tell observers exactly who they are and what they believe—and what they believe is inextricable with violence. This march was a threat and they know it and we know it. There’s no other way to take it. That’s who these people are. As somebody wrote online yesterday, if you wear a big red nose and clown shoes and hang out with clowns, don’t complain when everyone thinks you’re a clown.

Trump said he wanted to get the facts before reacting but he’s completely full of shit. A quick glance at his Twitter shows that he reacts immediately to every world event, every terrorist attack, before getting the facts. This is a president who flips out and rails at the slightest provocation. Look at the list of people and things he’s insulted repeatedly on Twitter: Rosie O’Donnell, CNN, Mika Brzezinski, Nordstrom’s, Megyn Kelly, Amazon, etc. Yet Nazis march down an American street and all of a sudden, he walks on eggshells. The man people voted for for “telling it like it is” all of a sudden can’t call out this ideology of hate and death for what it is.

This type of hate has been around forever and white supremacists have marched before but now it seems like they’ve been emboldened. Trump could have shut this down but instead spoke in a way that thrilled David Duke and the Daily Stormer and that cast of degenerates (pro tip: if David Duke and the Daily Stormer are happy with you, you’ve done something wrong). Whether he meant to or not, the president is helping turn over a rock, and now we see all the bugs crawling out.

The ideology of the white supremacists and Nazis and KKK only goes in one direction—mass death—and he knows it, or he should know it. Yet he does not have the courage to “tell it like it is” and call evil evil.

Sixty years ago, we had a president who led the entire world against the Nazis. Now we have a president who has white nationalists in the White House and can barely bring himself to speak out against this evil. What the hell happened to our country?