During the first presidential debate on Thursday, Donald Trump eagerly defended himself against criticism he has faced for nearly seven years.<\/p>\n
Moderator Jake Tapper asked President Biden whether he believed that those planning to vote for Trump were \u201cvoting against American democracy.\u201d Biden suggested that they were, offering examples of Trump\u2019s rhetoric that demonstrated the former president\u2019s anti-democratic impulses. Among them was Trump\u2019s reference to \u201cvery fine people\u201d having participated in a 2017 rally in Charlottesville organized by white nationalists.<\/p>\n
\u201cJake, both of you know that story has been totally wiped out,\u201d Trump responded, suggesting that criticism for his use of that phrase had been proven unfounded. He offered a muddled explanation (\u201cwhen you see the sentence, it said, 100 percent exoneration on that story\u201d) before accusing Biden of having invented it.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ll see it\u2019s debunked all over the place,\u201d Trump claimed. \u201cEvery anchor has \u2014 every reasonable actor has debunked it. And just the other day it came out where it was fully debunked. It\u2019s a nonsense story.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Truth Social, his social media platform, someone posted a video snippet from 2019 suggesting that even Tapper himself had dismissed the allegation that Trump was calling neo-Nazis \u201cvery fine people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The article that came out the other day on the subject was from the hoax-busting site Snopes. Its headline was: \u201cNo, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists \u2018Very Fine People.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
The article got a lot of traction on the pro-Trump internet because it provided precisely the headline that Trump has long sought on the subject. But supposedly exonerating Trump\u2019s response to the violence that unfolded in Charlottesville depends heavily on ignoring the context for what he said and when he said it \u2014 in context, Trump was indeed downplaying the action of the racist actors involved.<\/p>\n
A timeline is useful. A collection of white nationalists and neo-Nazis announced a rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017. It was called \u201cUnite the Right\u201d explicitly because it sought to unify the country\u2019s racist right-wing fringe with the Republican Party more broadly, a once-unthinkable unification that seemed more feasible seven months into Trump\u2019s administration. (White nationalists were enthusiastic about Trump\u2019s 2016 victory.)<\/p>\n
The night before, a group of white nationalists and neo-Nazis held a torchlight march in a park where the city planned to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Clips of the rally were shared online; marchers chanted such antisemitic slogans as \u201cJews will not replace us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Protecting the statue was also the putative focus of the Aug. 12 rally, a rally that attracted both a wide array of right-wing groups and counterprotesters. There were scuffles and fistfights between the demonstrators and antifascists wearing all-black outfits. In the early afternoon, a white supremacist named James Fields Jr. drove his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer.<\/p>\n
Trump made his first comments about the rally a little later at an event originally focused on veterans.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia,\u201d he said, reading from prepared remarks. \u201cWe condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence\u201d \u2014 he looked up and spoke off-the-cuff \u2014 \u201con many sides. On many sides. It\u2019s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump. Not Barack Obama. It\u2019s been going on for a long, long time.\u201d<\/p>\n
This pattern is by now a familiar one. Trump is given scripted comments, but he strays from them to more robustly defend himself. So he interjects that racist violence isn\u2019t his fault or predecessor Barack Obama\u2019s fault. And he suggests that the violence unfolded \u201con many sides\u201d \u2014 not just on the side that overtly supported his presidency. (Three years later, almost to the day, Trump would refuse to denounce adherents to the radicalized QAnon movement because \u201cthey like me very much.\u201d)<\/p>\n
After the event concluded, reporters shouted questions, including whether Trump felt he\u2019d denounced white nationalism strongly enough. Trump ignored them.<\/p>\n
There was an outcry over Trump\u2019s use of the term \u201cmany sides.\u201d So on Monday, Aug. 14, he presented prepared remarks from the White House. This time, he didn\u2019t go off-script.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo anyone who acted criminally in this weekend\u2019s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable,\u201d he said. \u201cJustice will be delivered. As I said on Saturday, we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.\u201d He did not reiterate the \u201con many sides\u201d part of that sentence.<\/p>\n
\u201cRacism is evil,\u201d he added later, still speaking from the teleprompter, \u201cand those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacist and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear.\u201d<\/p>\n
Early in 2016, Trump had come under fire when Tapper asked whether the presidential candidate would denounce the endorsement of former KKK leader David Duke. Trump didn\u2019t do so, saying he \u201cknew nothing\u201d about Duke and asked for a list of groups Tapper wanted him to condemn so that he could research them. After all, Tapper might \u201chave groups in there that are totally fine,\u201d which would be \u201cunfair.\u201d Tapper asked whether he couldn\u2019t denounce the KKK out of hand; Trump didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Duke was a scheduled speaker at \u201cUnite the Right.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the following day, Trump was scheduled to hold a news conference at Trump Tower to discuss infrastructure. It was the first opportunity reporters had to ask questions about Charlottesville, and Trump, once again speaking without notes, undercut the White House presentation from the previous day.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement,\u201d Trump insisted when asked why he waited so long to denounce the neo-Nazis. \u201cBut you don\u2019t make statements that direct unless you know the fact. And it takes a little while to get the facts.\u201d He insisted that he didn\u2019t \u201cwant to go quickly and just make a statement,\u201d the same argument he used with Tapper in 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I said on, remember this, Saturday, we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence,\u201d he added, again skipping the \u201cmany sides\u201d part.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou said there was hatred and violence on both sides,\u201d a reporter pointed out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do think there is blame \u2014 yes, I think there is blame on both sides,\u201d Trump replied. \u201cYou look at, you look at both sides. I think there\u2019s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don\u2019t have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe neo-Nazis started this thing,\u201d a reporter pointed out. \u201cThey showed up in Charlottesville.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cExcuse me, they didn\u2019t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group,\u201d Trump said. \u201cBut you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group \u2014 excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.\u201d<\/p>\n
He later expanded on this.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou had people \u2014 and I\u2019m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally \u2014 but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?\u201d Trump claimed. \u201cAnd the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats \u2014 you had a lot of bad people in the other group, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump later suggested that at the nighttime rally on Aug. 11, an event entirely populated by white nationalist or neo-Nazi groups chanting antisemitic slogans, there were \u201cpeople protesting, very quietly, the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee.\u201d He said there might have been \u201csome bad ones\u201d there, too, as there were at the Unite the Right rally. But the white nationalist rally organizers \u201chad a permit,\u201d he noted. \u201cThe other group didn\u2019t have a permit. So I only tell you this: There are two sides to a story.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is true, as the Snopes headline indicates, that Trump said that he was not talking about the white nationalists when offering praise for some of the participants in Unite the Right. But as The Washington Post\u2019s Fact Checker pointed out in a 2020 assessment of the controversy, it\u2019s not clear that there were any participants who weren\u2019t allied with the white nationalist elements that announced the rally in the first place. The Washington Post reported Aug. 10 that there would be a \u201cwhite nationalist rally\u201d in Charlottesville; does someone who attends a white nationalist rally deserve rhetorical distance from white nationalism?<\/p>\n
The reason that \u201cvery fine people\u201d lingers over Trump is that it is a shorthand for his eagerness to downplay the explicit pro-Trump, white nationalist origins of a protest that led to a woman being killed. He was \u201cexonerated\u201d to the extent that he said he was not talking about the white nationalists but, instead, about theoretical people who joined a white-nationalist-led rally. He was not exonerated on assigning blame for the brawling to both to neo-Nazis and those protesting the neo-Nazis. He was not exonerated for suggesting that Heyer\u2019s death was part of violence on \u201cmany sides.\u201d He was not exonerated for suggesting that the counterprotesters\u2019 lack of a rally permit somehow established moral equivalence with those they were protesting.<\/p>\n
Incidentally, it\u2019s also not true that Tapper ever \u201cdebunked\u201d Trump\u2019s comments. In the 2019 CNN segment linked by Trump\u2019s team on Truth Social, Tapper goes on to raise the same point made above.<\/p>\n
\u201cAgain, he didn\u2019t refer to Nazis as very fine people. He referred to the people protesting with the Nazis,\u201d Tapper said. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t know who are the good people there. Friday night was \u2018the Jews will not replace us.\u2019 Saturday, somebody was killed. At what point were there good people there?\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s team didn\u2019t include that part in the video it shared.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
During the first presidential debate on Thursday, Donald Trump eagerly defended himself against criticism he has faced for nearly seven years. Moderator Jake Tapper asked President Biden whether he believed that those planning to vote for Trump were \u201cvoting against American democracy.\u201d Biden suggested that they were, offering examples of Trump\u2019s rhetoric that demonstrated the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5652,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}