President Trump Friday noted when he told reporters after August 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Va., that there were “very fine people on both sides,” he was not referring to white supremacists.
Trump said the event, which was led by white supremacists, included people who were protesting the taking down of a monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Many southerners who are not white supremacists see such statues as historic emblems of southern history that should be preserved.
“I’ve answered that question,” the president said. “If you look at what I said, you will see 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. 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 he was maybe their favorite general. People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.”
Trump faced harsh backlash in the wake of the rally, in which a woman was killed by the white supremacists, for claiming there “very fine people on both sides.”
During the press conference in which he made that statement, Trump specifically said that by “very fine people” he was not referring to white supremacists.
Presidential candidate Joe Biden, who entered the 2020 race on Thursday morning, launched his campaign with an attack on Trump’s Charlottesville comments.
“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 said in the video. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.”
