Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Philip Rucker managed this week to pack an impressive amount of prejudices and ignorance into just a few sentences.
Appearing alongside Brian Williams on MSNBC, Rucker claimed President Trump supports the coronavirus quarantine protesters because, like the violent neo-Nazis who descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, they are his people.
When Trump “looks at images of these protesters,” the Washington Post reporter said, “he sees his own campaign banner. He knows that these are his supporters. They may not all be his supporters. We’re not sure who they all are going to vote for in November. But many of them are Trump supporters, are waving Trump flags.”
He added, “And Trump, the president, knows that he needs to show some solidarity with them. It’s one of the reasons why, for example, after the Charlottesville attack, he showed solidarity with the neo-Nazi protesters there.”
Trump has defended the quarantine demonstrators’ “right to protest, which is in direct violation of the social distancing guidelines that his own administration has put out,” Rucker noted in what he must have thought was a terrific “gotcha.”
First, could we please refrain from drawing any comparison between the quarantine protesters and actual white supremacists? For crying out loud.
Second, that last bit about Trump standing in solidarity with the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville is not even true. We have been over this a million times. But it is the lie that will not die, so it bears a quick revisit.
In 2017, a planned demonstration against the removal of a statue Robert E. Lee turned into a massive alt-right rally, complete with a massive counterdemonstration, that broke out into violence and the murder of one counter-protestor. Trump held a press conference. He was asked several times about the deadly clashes. At one point, the president said that there were “very fine people, on both sides.” The press and everyone who heard those six words were aghast, especially considering that a counter-protester in Charlottesville was murdered three days prior by a white supremacist. In context, however, it is clear the president did not attempt to “both sides” the issue.
“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis,” Trump told reporters. “I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of [the people at the rally] were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee.”
Note that Trump may have been wrong about exactly who showed up at the demonstration. You might even disagree that some supporters of General Lee are fine people. But Trump has made abundantly clear that that’s all he meant to say. There were fine people there who didn’t want the statue torn down — not that the neo-Nazis, who, frankly, dominated and embodied the spirit of that scary event, were “fine people.”
“You had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally,” Trump said. “But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”
“If you look,” he added later, “they were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones.”
Even so, the narrative that Trump stood in solidarity with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville has become canon thanks largely to journalistic dishonesty and bad faith. Even the Washington Post’s White House bureau chief keeps repeating it.
