Sometimes supporters of Donald Trump will point to the president's limited accomplishments and angrily say to conservatives who hold on to their antipathy for the president what, if anything, he could do for those who have yet to hop on the Trump Train to stop being "Never Trump."
And the answer, if we're being honest, is "probably nothing"? You can get a good sense why thanks to the way Trump's behaved for the last couple of days. John Podhoretz brushes the broad strokes here; the big point is that the lack of support, then and now, never really had to do with issues or with military strategy or anything like that. It had to do with temperament. Donald Trump is, simply put, temperamentally unsuited* for the job of "most powerful man in the known universe."
There are myriad ways that Donald Trump could have responded to the events in Charlottesville that not only highlighted the escalating violence on both sides while also explicitly and angrily denouncing white supremacists and the terror tactics of the nutjob who drove into a crowd of counter protesters. He could've even done it in ways that generally fit in with his mode of thinking/speechifying!
He could have brushed aside claims of support from white supremacists like David Duke by saying he doesn't need or want their votes, by highlighting his support in northern states, noting the way the rust belt voted for him because they want jobs, not because they were strongholds of the Confederacy. He could've made fun of the creeps waving Nazi and Confederate flags, maybe even by making a sly callback to a previous gaffe—"I like flags flown by countries that didn't lose to America"—while also sharply criticizing the violent antifa protests around the country or the anti-Trump leftwing activist who tried to assassinate a whole baseball team of GOP congressmen. (Remember that?) He could have denounced the idea that "fascists don't deserve free speech" while belittling bigots; it's not difficult to imagine a line of argument that goes something like "don't let these losers win by forcing us to trash our nation's big league commitment to free speech."
His surrogates could have pitched this as a "Sister Souljah moment" to a press corps constantly on the lookout for signs that the president has finally decided to act presidential. The argument would have added resonance if, in his comments, he specifically rejected David Duke's claim that Trump needs his supporters to win. "Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah comments explicitly compared that nutjob to Duke," they could whisper. "Well, here's Donald Trump explicitly rejecting David Duke! Time is a flat circle!"
But Donald Trump's simply incapable of doing anything like the above. Because, as best as I can tell, Donald Trump's guiding principle is "well, if they don't say mean things about me, I won't say mean things about them." I remain convinced that this is why there's been so much hesitation to explicitly condemn Putin: It doesn't have anything to do with pee tapes or financial ties, just, simply, that Putin has never said anything particularly harsh about Trump, so why would Trump have anything bad to say about the guy who ordered efforts to tamper with America's presidential election? This is why Trump can't bring himself to explicitly condemn a rally with literal neo-Nazis yammering on about blood and soil, but he can find time to denounce an executive who left his manufacturing council:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/897079051277537280
Hey, a man's gotta have priorities.
I dunno, it's all incredibly dispiriting. Because things are going to get worse before they get better, and we need someone now who can at least pay lip service to the idea that America—as an entity, as an ideal—needs to come together, to unify. Donald Trump is not that person. He can't even pretend to be for a weekend, it's just not in his nature. And it's not in my nature to support such a person.
*I can already hear you hitting "but Hillary but Hillary but Hillary but Hillary" on your keyboard—save it for someone who voted for her.