One Dead, Dozens Injured After Car Slams Counter-Protesters at White Supremacist Rally in…
Amid the chaos of a canceled “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia attended by white …
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Trump began today’s question and answer session (which was supposed to be about rewriting rules on federal infrastructure projects) by saying he was late to issue a statement condemning Nazis specifically “because [he] didn’t know all of the facts.”
“Frankly, people still don’t know all of the facts,” he continued.
But Trump’s versions of “the facts” mirrored the revisionist narrative advanced by the alt-right to a disturbing degree. Essentially, the president reasserted the “many sides” stance he took in the immediate aftermath of this weekend’s events. When asked if he agreed with Senator John McCain that the alt-right was responsible for the violence, Trump asked, “What about alt-left that came charging?”
“Do they have any semblance of guilt?” said Trump. “They came charging with clubs in their hand. Do they have any problem? I think they do.”
Trump then reiterated his claim that there is “blame on many sides,” telling the press, “You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was very violent.”
Shifting from simple revisionism to rewriting the events of the weekend wholesale, Trump next claimed that the far right rally characterized by organizer Jason Kessler as a “pro-white demonstration,” included “a lot of people” other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists who were there to “innocently protest.”
“The night before, if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E Lee,” said Trump of the torch rally that had marchers chanting the phrase “blood and soil” popularized by Nazi Germany.
“There are two sides to a story,” said Trump, seemingly acknowledging the value of both the truth and convenient lies.