Hours after bowing to mounting pressure to condemn white supremacists for their involvement in a rally where a 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, was killed in an apparent terrorist-style car attack, Donald Trump seemed to do everything in his power to make clear that his concession was extracted grudgingly. “Made additional remarks on Charlottesville and realize once again that the #Fake News Media will never be satisfied...truly bad people!” the president tweeted Monday, attacking journalists with more force and specificity than was evident in his initial statement on the racist violence in Virginia. The tirade continued on his Twitter account Tuesday morning, when Trump retweeted a crime statistic from far-right extremist Jack Posobiec intended to put Saturday’s neo-Nazi gathering in perspective. “Meanwhile: 39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that?” he said. (Posobiec previously spread a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton, alongside a clutch of other Democrats, ran a child-sex slavery ring out of a Washington Pizza parlor, an allegation that led a gunman to attack the establishment.) Hours later, Trump retweeted—and then deleted—a cartoon of a train running over a person with a CNN logo covering their head. The same account that Trump promoted has repeatedly shared racist memes and anti-Semitic content, including articles from former K.K.K. leader David Duke.

The macabre Twitter spree, with its gruesome invocation of vehicular manslaughter, was not just an obtuse comment on Charlottesville. It was also an assertion that the president would continue to govern on his own terms, after being subjected to hours of arm-twisting by his aides and advisers, who reportedly pressured him to amend his initial reaction blaming “many sides” for the violence. According to the Associated Press, Trump was reluctant to alter his remarks, which he believed effectively denounced all forms of bigotry, and he expressed frustration about what he perceived as the media’s unfair assessment. Still, he capitulated on Monday, delivering a brief statement at the White House designed to curb the growing unrest. Purposefully punctuating his speech with “as I said on Saturday,” Trump denounced the hate groups and called for unity. “Racism is evil,” he read, haltingly, from a teleprompter. “And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the K.K.K., neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” He stopped short of describing Saturday’s violence as an act of terrorism, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster had done.

Trump’s second set of comments, which came some 48 hours after Heyer’s death, were widely deemed to have been too little, too late. Even before he had given his updated statement, Trump had worked at undermining the credibility of its sentiment, attacking Kenneth C. Frazier, the head of Merck and one of the country’s top African-American executives, who announced Monday morning that he was resigning from the American Manufacturing Council in protest. “Now that Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma has resigned from President’s Manufacturing Council, he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!” the president shot back on Twitter with the speed and ferocity that his critics were hoping to have seen applied to Charlottesville.

For many, the message was loud and clear. White supremacists who were cheered by the president’s hesitant, ambivalent response to the rally heard another dog-whistle Tuesday morning when Trump retweeted a Fox News story reporting that he may pardon Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has been accused of federal civil-rights violations for allegedly mistreating prisoners, many of whom are black and Hispanic, and who was recently found guilty of criminal contempt for failing to heed a judge’s order to stop profiling suspected undocumented immigrants.

The president’s two-sided approach to Charlottesville recalls a grim tactic he adopted in his election campaign, when he struggled to directly repudiate an endorsement from David Duke. “Sure, if that would make you feel better, I would certainly repudiate. I don’t know anything about him,” he told MSNBC’s John Heilemann in August 2015. This structure of smoke and mirrors, however, in which he tries to appease both his critics and supporters simultaneously, seems to have fallen flat in Washington. Several high-profile Republicans forcefully denounced the president’s messaging over the weekend, and his approval rating dropped to an all-time low of 34 percent. But if Trump’s strategy has further alienated establishment circles, it seems to have worked effectively in alt-right factions, who, unsurprisingly, have not taken his belated criticism seriously. “The statement today was more ‘kumbaya’ nonsense,” white supremacist leader Richard B. Spencer, who attended the Charlottesville rally, told reporters on Monday, cheerfully. “He sounded like a Sunday school teacher.”