Editorial: Senator’s ‘white nationalist’ gaffe gets at a wider problem within the GOP

It was in August of 2017 that then-President Donald Trump, speaking after a deadly showdown between avowed white supremacists and anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, shocked the nation by blithely declaring that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the conflict.
It wasn’t that most Americans were so naïve as to believe racism no longer infected the national bloodstream, even at the top levels of politics. But it was nonetheless jolting to hear a sitting president pub...