Donald Trump continues to believe that his initial response to the violence that was displayed at the July 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was correct:
President Trump on Friday defended his comments after the 2017 “Unite the Right” protests in which an avowed neo-Nazi killed a woman and injured dozens of others in Charlottesville, arguing that his focus was on the protesters defending the monument of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Trump, pressed on whether he stood by his comments that there were “very fine people on both sides,” told reporters, “If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly. And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”
Former vice president Joe Biden resurrected Trump’s response to the deadly rally by self-professed white supremacists in a video to launch his presidential campaign on Thursday. In it, Biden said Trump’s remarks “shocked the conscience of this nation.”
“With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden says in the video. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”
Trump, who spoke to reporters en route to a speech to the National Rifle Association in Indiana, said, “People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.”Trump and others have tried to distinguish between the self-proclaimed white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and the other supporters of Confederate monuments, who were all marching in Charlottesville that weekend.
But the events that weekend were organized by a self-proclaimed white nationalist, Richard Spencer, and those in attendance wore swastikas and chanted anti-Semitic slogans.
James Alex Fields Jr., who killed Heather Heyer and injured 35 other people when he plowed his car into a group of counterprotesters at the rally by self-proclaimed white supremacists, pleaded guilty to hate crimes in federal court earlier this month.
Fields, 21, of Ohio admitted guilt to 29 of 30 counts in a federal indictment as part of a deal with prosecutors, who agreed they would not seek the death penalty in the case. Fields is set to be sentenced July 3.
As Eli Stokes at The Los Angeles Times notes, in responding like this Trump effectively took the bait that had been laid for him by former Vice-President Joe Biden, who used Charlottesville as a symbol of Trump’s America in his campaign’s opening message yesterday:
It took one day for President Trump to take Joe Biden’s bait.
Departing the White House on Friday morning, Trump defended the comments he made in the aftermath of the violent 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va. when he claimed that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Biden had focused on those comments Thursday as he announced his presidential candidacy. The former vice president cited Trump’s comments as evidence of the president’s corrosive impact on what he called “the soul of the nation.”
Trump did not back away from what he said nearly two years earlier, despite the criticism he has gotten from lawmakers in both parties.
“If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly,” Trump said Friday, after being asked about Biden’s reference to his Charlottesville response.
“I was talking about people who went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general — whether you like it or not, he was one of the great generals.”
“I’ve spoken to many generals here right at the White House, and many people thought, of the generals, they think that he was maybe their favorite general. People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.”
The August 2017 violence in Charlottesville began with a “Unite the Right” march organized by white nationalist groups upset over plans to remove a statue of the Confederate general from a local park. The march drew several hundred torch-bearing men and women to the University of Virginia campus, where many took part in an evening march across the quadrangle at which they shouted, among other things,
“You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”
Several fights broke out between anti-racism activists and far-right attendees, many of whom carried shields, weapons and Nazi and Confederate battle flags. One woman was killed when a driver plowed a car into a crowd of protesters.
As much as the president relishes engaging directly with his adversaries, his controversial response to Charlottesville and his hesitation in forcefully repudiating white nationalist groups appears to be a part of his record that won’t help him with swing voters heading into next year’s campaign.
Biden, seeking to separate himself from a sprawling 20-candidate primary field by presenting himself as Democrats’ strongest general-election candidate, sought in his announcement video to frame the 2020 race as a “battle for the soul of the nation.”
Recalling Trump’s response to Charlottesville in his three-and-a-half minute video, Biden said: “In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”
“If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen,” Biden said.
While Trump is correct that the purported intent of the rally in Charlottesville was to protest against plans by the city to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a prominent location in the city, it quickly became obvious what the real intent of the rally was. Rather than being just a simple rally about a statue, though, the event clearly had overtones of a Nazi rally at Nuremberg in the 1930s with Nazi-era slogans like “Blood and Soil!” and “The Jews will not replace us!” were chanted by torch-bearing men, followed by a rally the following day that resulted in violence between participants and counter-protestors that led to the death of one woman and more than a dozen injuries. These events, of course, took on a national tone thanks to the President’s response to the tragic events of that Saturday. In his initial response, Trump blamed ‘both sides’ for the violence, referred to the participants in the rally as “very fine people,” and refused to directly condemn groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, which was present at the rally, or the broader so-called alt-right movement whose supporters made up the vast majority of the participants. The outrage over these comments was sufficiently broad, even from fellow Republicans in Washington, that the White House was compelled to have Trump deliver a follow-up comment the following Monday that was more measured and emphatic than what he had said before. Whatever damage had been repaired by that statement, though, was short-lived, though, because less than twenty-four hours later Trump repeated his ‘both sides’ argument in a press conference at Trump Tower in New York and then repeated it again a month later in the wake of a meeting purportedly intended to discuss race with Republican Senator Tim Scott, the only African-American Republican in the Senate. Last year, near the one-year anniversary of the incident, the President doubled down on his assertion that his initial reaction was the correct one.
Additionally, Trump’s claims that he was merely speaking about the people who were at the protest because they were against removing the statue of Lee, his long history of racially divisive rhetoric defies the conclusion that there is an innocent explanation for the President’s intentions in siding with the protesters. In addition to the comments he made in the wake of the tragic events in Charlottesville last year, Trump has engaged in a number of other actions that demonstrate the extent to which he is willing to engage in racially divisive language in order to advance his personal and political interests. From the day he started his campaign three years ago, this President has attacked Mexicans, Muslims, disabled people, a Federal District Court Judge who happened to be Mexican-American and a Gold Star Family who happened to be Muslim. In response to N.F.L. players who were peacefully kneeling to protest racially biased police violence, he responded by calling the largely African-American players “sons of bitches.” Both during the campaign and since becoming President, he has used campaign-style speeches to turn his crowds of supporters into raving lunatics by throwing them red meat on the most divisive issues facing the nation. More importantly, he has done so not only knowingly but with a rather obvious sense of glee at the chaos that he is causing.
In addition to this, Trump has succeeded as a politician largely by appealing to the worst aspects of the unhinged populism, xenophobia, and nativism that has made up the worst aspects of American politics. In doing so, he managed to not only win the Republican nomination for President but to win the Presidency itself. Since taking office, he has not only engaged in the same racially divisive rhetoric he did as a candidate, but he has implemented it into policy in the form of the travel ban that applies almost exclusively to majority Muslim nations, the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has primarily benefited the children of Latino immigrants, and he has implemented a so-called ‘zero tolerance’ programthat for a time resulted in the separation of parents and children arriving at the border. Finally, he reportedly referred to immigrants from Africa as coming to the United States from “shithole” countries. Through this rhetoric and action, the President has demonstrated where his sympathies lie, and his effort to paper over the truth about Charlottesville a year after the tragic death of Heather Heyer is revealed to be the same non-condemnation that he issued in the immediate aftermath of the events of July 2017.
The most important point, of course, is that Trump has proven Biden’s assertion that things such as his remarks in the wake of the Charlottesville attack make Trump unfit to lead the country. That won’t matter to the people who are rabid supporters of his President, of course, but it’s something that those of us who are are embarrassed by him on daily basis can point to as yet another reason why he does not belong in the White House.
