“Jake, you both know that story has been completely wiped away,” Trump responded, suggesting that the criticism of his use of the phrase had proven unfounded. He offered a muddled explanation (“If you look at the text, it says that story is 100 percent exonerated”) before accusing Biden of making up the story.
“You’ll see that it’s been debunked everywhere,” Trump claimed. “Every anchor has debunked it, every decent actor has debunked it. And just the other day it was completely debunked. It’s nonsense.”
Tapper’s social media platform, Truth Social, posted a portion of a 2019 video suggesting that even Tapper himself denied Trump’s claim that neo-Nazis were “very fine people.”
A recent article on the subject came from the debunking website Snopes, with the headline: “No, Trump Didn’t Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Respectable People.'”
The article garnered a lot of attention online from Trump supporters, because it was exactly the kind of headline Trump has been seeking on this issue for years. Exonerating President Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville relies heavily on ignoring the context of what he said and when he said it, a context in which he certainly downplayed the actions of the racists involved.
A timeline is helpful: A group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis announced a rally in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017. The rally was explicitly called “Unite the Right” because it aimed to unite the country’s racist right-wing extremists with the Republican Party more broadly, making a once-unthinkable rally seem possible seven months into the Trump administration. (White supremacists had been enthralled by Trump’s 2016 victory.)
The night before, a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis held a torchlight march through a park where the city plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Videos of the rally shared online included participants chanting anti-Semitic slogans such as “The Jews will not replace us.”
Protecting the statue was also the putative focus of a rally on August 12, which drew a wide range of right-wing and counter-demonstrators. Skirmishes and fistfights broke out between demonstrators and anti-fascists dressed all in black. In the early afternoon, a white supremacist named James Fields Jr. drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer.
Trump first commented on the rally shortly after the event, which initially focused on veterans.
“We are watching the horrific events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia,” the president said, reading from prepared remarks. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this terrible hatred, bigotry and violence,” he said, looking up and improvising. “On many sides. On many sides. This has been going on in our country for a long time. Not Donald Trump. Not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a very long time.”
The pattern is familiar by now: Trump is given scripted comments, then goes off script to more forcefully defend himself, interjecting that racist violence is not his or his predecessor, Barack Obama’s, and suggesting that it unfolded “on many sides,” not just those who openly supported his presidency. (Three years later, on almost the same day, Trump refused to condemn supporters of the radical QAnon movement, because “they like me so much.”)
After the event, reporters peppered Mr Trump with questions, including about whether he felt he had condemned white supremacy strongly enough, but he ignored them.
Trump’s use of the phrase “many sides” sparked outrage, so he gave a prepared speech from the White House on Monday, August 14. This time, he didn’t deviate from the script.
“Those who committed criminal acts in this weekend’s racist violence will be held fully accountable,” he said. “Justice will be served. As we said on Saturday, we condemn in the strongest terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” He did not repeat the “on many sides” part of that sentence.
“Racism is evil,” he added later, still speaking from the teleprompter. “Those who commit violence in the name of racism are criminals and thugs, but also the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are antithetical to everything we hold dear.”
Trump came under fire in early 2016 when Tapper asked whether the presidential candidate would condemn former KKK leader David Duke’s support. Trump said he “knew nothing” about Duke and did not condemn him. Tapper sent Trump a list of groups he wanted to denounce and asked him to look into them. After all, Tapper said, “There may be groups on there that are completely innocent,” but that would be “unfair.” Tapper asked if Trump couldn’t immediately denounce the KKK, but Trump didn’t.
Duke was scheduled to speak at “Unite the Right.”
The next day, Trump was scheduled to hold a press conference at Trump Tower to discuss infrastructure plans, the first time reporters could ask him questions about Charlottesville, but he again spoke without notes, undermining his White House announcement the previous day.
“The first statement that I made on Saturday was a great statement,” Trump argued when asked why it took him so long to condemn neo-Nazis. “But you can’t make a direct statement unless you know the facts, and it’s going to take some time to get the facts.” Trump maintained he was “in no rush to make a statement,” using the same argument he used against Tapper in 2016.
“As we said on Saturday, we condemn in the strongest terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence,” he added, again omitting the “many sides” part.
“You said there was hatred and violence on both sides,” the reporter pointed out.
“I do think there is responsibility. Yes, I think there is responsibility on both sides,” Trump responded. “You look at both sides. I think there is responsibility on both sides, and I have no doubt about that, and you have no doubt about that, and, and, and, and, if you reported it accurately, you would say that.”
“Neo-Nazis started this,” the reporter noted. “They showed up in Charlottesville.”
“With all due respect, they did not identify as neo-Nazis, and there were some very bad people in that group,” Trump said, “but there were some very fine people on both sides, and there was a group — and I saw the same pictures as you — that group was people who had come together to protest the removal of a statue that was very important to them and the renaming of Robert E. Lee Park.”
He later elaborated on this.
“I’m not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists, because those are completely condemnable. But there were a lot of people in that group who weren’t neo-Nazis and white supremacists, OK?” Trump argued. “And the press totally mistreated them. Now, there were fine people in the other group, but there were also troublemakers, and they came in black clothes, helmets, and baseball bats. There were a lot of bad people in the other group.”
Trump later suggested that the rally on the night of August 11th had not only included a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis shouting anti-Semitic slogans, but that there were “people very quietly protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue.” He said there may have been “bad people” there, as there were at the Unite the Right rally. But he noted that the organizers of the white supremacist rally “had a permit.” “The other group did not have a permit. So I’ll say this: There are two sides to things.”
As the Snopes headline indicates, it is true that Trump said he was not referring to white supremacists when he praised some of the Unite the Right participants. But as Washington Post fact-checkers noted in their assessment of the 2020 controversy, it is not clear whether any of the participants were not allied with the white supremacists who announced the rally in the first place. On August 10, the Washington Post reported that a “white supremacist rally” would be held in Charlottesville. Do those who attend white supremacist rallies deserve to rhetorically distance themselves from white supremacy?
The phrase “very fine people” sticks with Trump because it is a succinct expression of his eagerness to downplay the explicitly pro-Trump, white supremacist origins of the protests that led to the woman’s murder. He was “exonerated” for saying he was not talking about white supremacists, but fictitious people who attended a white supremacist-led rally. He was not exonerated for attributing blame for the melee to both neo-Nazis and those protesting against neo-Nazis. He was not exonerated for suggesting Heyer’s death was part of an act of violence “on many sides.” He was not exonerated for suggesting that the protesters’ lack of a rally permit somehow established their moral equality with the targets of the protests.
Incidentally, it’s not true that Tapper “exposed” Trump’s comments. He made the same points above in a 2019 CNN segment that Trump’s team linked to Truth Social.
“Again, he wasn’t calling the Nazis good people, he was calling the people who protested with the Nazis,” Tapper said. “I don’t know who the good people there are. On Friday night it was ‘The Jews can’t replace us’. On Saturday someone got killed. At what point were there good people there?”
Trump’s team did not include that segment in the video it shared.
