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Article snippet: WASHINGTON — President Trump did more on Tuesday than simply draw an equivalence between the torch-wielding marchers and the leftist activists who clashed with them in Charlottesville, Va. He relinquished what presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan have regarded as a cardinal duty of their job: set a moral course to unify the nation. Asked during his news conference in Trump Tower whether he would put white supremacists and neo-Nazis on the same “moral plane” as their liberal and leftist resisters, a frustrated Mr. Trump replied, “I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane.” “What I’m saying is this,” he explained. “You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and it was horrible.” Like much of what Mr. Trump says, his statement could be dismissed as an offhand remark, thrown out in the heat of a contentious exchange with reporters. The president, after all, declared a day earlier that “racism is evil” — that the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and white supremacists “are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” Yet Mr. Trump’s refusal Tuesday to pass an explicit moral judgment on the violence in Charlottesville seemed a genuine reflection of his beliefs. Certainly, it is similar to his refusal to condemn the tactics of autocrats like President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines or President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “There are a lot of killers,” Mr. Trump said to Bill O’Reilly on Fox New... Link to the full article to read more