It is unimaginable to many that a monster like Trump could really be president. So when he was elected, a lot of people decided that "Trump was not the catastrophe so many of us had assumed he would be" and that "he had been secretly Presidential all along or was about to become Presidential."

So the same thing is going on with Trump's repeated signaling of his affiliation with white nationalism. Even though he keeps "accidentally" swiping logos from fascists or retweeting white nationalist propaganda or inviting extremists to the White House, it is hard for most Americans, especially journalists, to believe the evidence of their own eyes. It's unimaginable that an American president would do such a thing, so it's easier to ignore it or minimize it than to look at what is happening in front of our eyes.

Trump is so bad — so racist, so corrupt, such a bully, such a pig — that merely describing what he's doing makes a person sound crazy. So instead of doing that, we minimize and ignore the real situation.

But the simplest explanation for why Trump — who has been a racist his whole life and who is running concentration camps on the border — keeps winking at white nationalists in public is not that he keeps innocently slipping up time and again. It's because, as his policies show, he agrees with the white nationalist agenda. It's that he's doing this on purpose. There is no longer any reason, and has never been any real reason, to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt.