US senator warns Trump can't calm down coming violence

A Republican senator has warned that "it feels like violence is coming" and US President Donald Trump will not be able to bring calm to the nation in the face of it.

Ben Sasse shared his thoughts in an extensive Facebook post on Friday evening saying they were prompted by the violence which occurred in Charlottesville last weekend.

"I doubt that Donald Trump will be able to calm and comfort the nation in that moment," Sasse wrote. "He (and lots of others) will probably tell an awful combination of partial truths and outright falsehoods."

He criticized Trump and his administration over the response to the incident, which Sasse believed to be motivated by white supremacists. 

"On top of the trust deficits that are already baked so deeply in, unity will be very hard to come by," he added.

In his post he maintained that some of the president’s closest advisers see racial division as an opportunity. 

"Besides ability and temperament, I also worry that national unity will be unlikely because there are some whispering in the president's ear that racial division could be good politics for them," Sasse wrote.

"I worry that some on the left are also going to salivate over these divisions. Like the president's ear-whisperers," he continued. "They see a divided nation as good for their political objectives."

He further argued that the current national debate should not be "a fight about historical monuments."

Many state and local governments are taking steps to remove Confederate statues in the wake of the Charlottesville violence, which was originally organized to oppose the removal of a statue there.

Citing the historic value of Confederate monuments, Trump has criticized their removal.

Read more: 

• US cities step up removal of Confederate statues
• US protestors topple Confederate statue in North Carolina
• Charlottesville mayor calls for swift removal of Lee statue

Trump has been criticized both in the country and abroad over his response to the violence in Charlottesville.

"White supremacy and racism are un-American, period," the Republican senator wrote. "The heartbreak in Charlottesville was the fault of the ‎white supremacists. Heather Heyer was murdered by an act of terrorism. The driver used his car to target public marchers."

Last week, thousands of white supremacists, KKK members and neo-Nazis descended on Charlottesville for a “Unite the Right” rally. The march however turned violent when a man plowed a vehicle into a group of anti-hate demonstrators protesting against the white supremacist rally, killing at least three people and injuring 20 others.

Trump's response has been criticized for initially blaming the violence on “many sides,” and for failing to blame white supremacist organizers.

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