Chris Wallace and Joe Biden repeated a controversial claim during the presidential debate — that President Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
“Close your eyes, try to remember the people coming out of the field with the torches, their veins bulging, spewing anti-Semitic bile, accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan. A young woman got killed. And they asked the president what he thought, and he said there were ‘very fine people on both sides.’ No president has ever said anything like that,” Biden said.
Biden’s answer came in response to Wallace recounting how Biden said he came to his decision to run for president. Wallace did not challenge Biden on the veracity of those claims.
“You have said that President Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville three years ago, when he talked about ‘very fine people’ on both sides, was what directly led you to launch this run for president,” Wallace said. “Why should voters trust you rather than your opponent to deal with the race issues facing this country over the next four years?”
“He said they were very fine people.”@JoeBiden and Chris Wallace repeat the lie that @realDonaldTrump called white supremacists “very fine people.”
Trump specifically excluded white supremacists and racists, saying they should be “condemned totally” after Charlottesville. pic.twitter.com/lsF4bxJar1
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 30, 2020
After the events in Charlottesville, Trump said that he condemned in “the strongest possible terms, this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.”
The president said there were “very fine people on both sides,” apparently referring to people he said were in Charlottesville protesting the removal of a statue and renaming of a park named in honor of Robert E.Lee, and those who wanted the statue removed.
“Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides,” Trump said at a press conference. “You had people in that group — excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures 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.”
Trump added that he wasn’t “talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”
