Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told the Washington Examiner he was disappointed with the weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Va., as well as President Trump’s move Tuesday to equate the actions of white supremacists there with demonstrators who held counter-protests.
“There needs to be outspoken rejection of neo-Nazis, of white supremacists, and KKK, and there should be absolutely no equivocation,” said Cantor, of Richmond, who served in the Virginia House of Delegates before being elected to Congress. He rose to House majority leader, making him the highest ranking elected Jewish politician in America until he was defeated in his Republican primary in 2014.
“When we see the president, basically, ascribing, or assigning equal blame? I just can’t buy it. I just don’t agree with that,” Cantor added, during a telephone conversation.
White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and KKK members marched in Charlottesville on Saturday onstensibly to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the top general for the Confederacy during the Civil War. They skirmished with counter protesters, and at one point, a white supremacist allegedly drove his car into a crowd and murdered a 32 year-old, Heather Heyer, who was there to demonstrate against the racist gathering.
Trump did not immediately condemn the white supremacists by name on Saturday. By Monday, he had changed his tune and in prepared remarks offered specific criticism. On Tuesday, during a news conference at Trump Tower in New York, the president doubled back to his original vague admonishment against “many sides” involved in the protests, saying that many good people were among the white supremacists marching for the Lee statue, despite the racist and anti-semitic slogans and epithets they wielded.
Cantor said it was awful to see this happening in Virginia, the “cradle” of American democracy. Thomas Jefferson, a founder and the third U.S. president, wrote the Declaration of Independence and was President George Washington’s secretary of state.
“It did particulary alarm me,” Cantor said. “I started my career in House of Delegates in the state legislature. I always tell the story, when I sat in that chamber for nine years — for 45 days every year — it was this granite plaque, right behind my chair, which had the statute of religious freedom … which obviously became part of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; it was all about religious freedom. As a Jew, that speaks to me in so many ways that this country was so welcoming of all faiths.”
“So, to see this demonstration take place in Charlottesville just blows my mind, both as a Jew and a Virginian. We are the cradle of the democracy,” Cantor added.
The former congressman, now a managing director at Moelis & Company, was a part of the band of conservatives that included current House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and others who gained prominence with support from grassroots Republicans who thought the GOP establishment had led the party astray and away from its small-government roots.
Opinions changed after Cantor ended up in leadership. Now, he was a member of the hated GOP establishment, that contributed to his loss to Rep. Dave Brat in his 2014 primary. It was an early harbinger of what was to come for the GOP in the 2016 presidential race, although few recognized that at the time.
Cantor, who backed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the presidential primary, doubted that Trump’s comments on Tuesday would cost him measurable support from a Republican voting base that is driven by populism, rather than philosophical conservatism.
“I think that the party is President Trump’s party now,” he said. “I do think that he is someone who got elected outside of the mainstream of conservatism and much of his agenda is based on populism; it’s based on a disruptive revolution, if you will. It’s not based on the principles of limited government and conservative temperament.”
