Yesterday, Trump gave a defensive and defiant press conference, where he doubled down on his previous statements about Charlottesville. He said that not everybody at the rally was a Nazi. There were equally evil people there who attacked the protesters. The protesters had a permit. And he questioned whether or not we were going to start taking down George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues next.

A lot of pundits said that Trump made a major misstep. He should have simply said that Nazi’s were evil and moved on to talk about his infrastructure plans.

I’m not entirely sure that it was a misstep. I think Trump knows his base a lot better than we do. They want to honor Thomas Jefferson. They were unsettled by the Black Lives Matter movement and the attacks on police. They fear the restrictions on freedom of speech.

They are also dealing with major disruptions in their communities. That’s why Trump also talks a lot about the opioid crisis. I saw a whole lotta white junkies in Asheville last week. I saw horrific numbers of twenty years olds passed out on the sidewalk and smoking cigarettes outside methadone clinics. I haven’t seen scenes like that since New York City in the 1980s. The local news featured the mayor of Nashville who talked about losing her son to drugs.

Trump is purposefully bringing it all together. He doesn’t need John McCain or Mitch McConnell. He’s building his own party. And a scary one it is.