WHAT a difference location can make. Having at first blamed “many sides” for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Trump appeared in the White House’s Diplomatic Room on Monday to denounce racism as “evil” and describe the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists as “criminals and thugs”.

At last, here was a commander-in-chief showing clear moral leadership and confronting the wickedness of the “alt-right”. Maybe the old place on Pennsylvania Avenue was finally working its magic.

Alas, no. One day and 200 miles later, back home in Trump Tower, New York, The Donald had reverted to The Mouth. “There is blame on both sides,” he told a press conference described by the New York Times as a “wild, street-corner shouting match”. Referring to anti-racist protesters as the “alt-left”, he said: “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that.”

Nobody wants to say that because one side and one side only was to blame in Charlottesville: the racists. As Senator John McCain told the President, in sentiments repeated across the party divide, there is no moral equivalency between racists and Americans standing up to defy hate and bigotry. One of those Americans, a young woman, lost her life defying hate and bigotry.

There should be no room for uncertainty as to which side a person, a President, is on when it comes to racists. But for the absolute avoidance of any presidential doubt, when the former head of the KKK thanks you for your “honesty and courage” in criticising “leftist terrorists” it is time to wake up and smell the mess you have landed yourself in.

In the space of 23 New York minutes, Donald Trump has managed to achieve the unthinkable: heightening tensions, sowing further division, and bolstering a far right that is already spreading into the American body politic like the nastiest of viruses. At one time, a headline asking “Is America headed for a new kind of civil war?” might have been an internet bad joke. This week it appeared atop an article in The New Yorker.

But hey, another 24 hours, another set of bad headlines. It has become customary to sigh wearily at each new Trump controversy. The Donald is a storm in human form that shows no sign of blowing itself out. Many Americans, in common with the rest of the world, have resolved themselves to the mayhem. Like the weather, Hurricane Donald is always with us. No point complaining too much, just carry on.

His response to Charlottesville, however, takes even this President into new, worrying realms of irresponsibility. Before and since the days of Robert E Lee, the pro-slavery general whose statues the alt-righters are so keen on preserving, race has been the single most explosive issue in American politics. Slavery was a wound to the very soul of America and it has never healed. Then, as now, as in Charlottesville last weekend, combatting racism is not just one more part of a president’s job. It is a matter of life and death.

This summer in the US a new movie was released called Detroit. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, it opens in Scotland next week. The film begins with a glance at the history of a divided America, showing the various flights that have taken place: African-Americans from the south to the north, whites from the cities to the suburbs.

Bigelow then homes in on the Detroit riots of 1967 and a particular incident in the city’s Algiers Motel. It was there, on another date that will live in infamy, that three young black men were killed by white police officers. The director of The Hurt Locker turns the face of racist America to the camera and it is the ugliest of sights. Perhaps what is most shocking of all, however, is to come out of the cinema into the light again knowing that what you have just seen is not the stuff of history but an instalment in a continuing story. One played out in every city in which an African-American is shot and killed by a largely white police force. And yes, one played out in Charlottesville last weekend.

Those who started the fight in Virginia may try to fool themselves that they are just another political movement exercising their right to free speech. They may have a fancy new name, the alt-right. They may warm their hatreds on social media instead of gathering round a fiery cross. But they are the same thugs they have always been. Different decade, new century, same sewer-fed poison.

Just when one thought his press conference could not get any more troubling, Hurricane Donald blew into a new area. Speaking about statues being taken down, he wondered if it would be those of George Washington next week and Thomas Jefferson the week after. “Where does it stop?” he asked.

Where indeed. On a positive note, some city councils are taking a lead and removing Confederate monuments. Significantly, business leaders have been removing themselves from presidential advisory councils over Mr Trump’s failure to sufficiently condemn white supremacists. Business, perhaps fearing consumer boycotts, has no trouble deciding which side it is on.

Nor does Theresa May. In stating yesterday that she saw no equivalence between those who propound fascist views and those who oppose them, the Prime Minister was not just echoing Senator McCain, she was chiding the US President. The same President, it should be noted, who has been invited on a state visit to the UK. How much more does Mr Trump now have to do, or not do, for that invitation to be withdrawn?

If the 45th President has been consistent in one thing since taking office it has been his inability to accept criticism. When taken to task he lashes out. Not for the first time he is being called on to be better than that, to be as big as the office he inhabits. This time he must listen, because this time things are different. If he cannot see this, if he will not listen to those urging him to draw a red white and blue line against racism, one genuinely fears what comes next.