PBS NewsHour’s Yamiche Alcindor managed this week to cram two major falsehoods into a tirade that lasted only a little more than a minute.
That is impressive. Your tax dollars hard at work.
Alcindor’s error-riddled rant came amid a broader attack on the 2020 Republican National Convention, where she claimed that attempts to humanize President Trump will stand in direct contradiction to his supposed racism and likely white supremacist sympathies.
“President Trump has really, really beat up on the Black Lives Matter movement. He has called people anarchists. He has called them not good for America,” she said.
Alcindor added (emphasis mine), “He has really called into question whether or not people should be taking to the streets after we see deaths like Jacob Blake in Wisconsin or George Floyd in Minnesota.”
Jacob Blake is dead? That should come as news to Blake, who is alive and in stable condition.
Alcindor continued, moving on from straight-up falsehood to historical revisionism.
“But critics of President Trump say that no matter what people around him say, the president himself has really been the person giving his critics their ammunition,” she said.
She added (and I add the emphasis): “We can think back to his response after Charlottesville, when he said there are very fine people that go to Nazi rallies, and even now, as we’re in the midst of this racial reckoning, he’s talking about the idea that he doesn’t think that police reform or systemic racism is as widespread as Democrats make it out to seem.”
That again. It really is the line that will not die.
In 2017, a planned demonstration against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee turned into a massive alt-right rally, which then inspired a massive counterdemonstration. The alt-right rally soon descended into violence, including the murder of one counterprotester. Trump later held a press conference in which reporters asked him several questions about the deadly clashes. At one point, the president said there were “very fine people, on both sides.” The press and everyone who heard those six words were aghast, especially considering a white supremacist had just murdered a counterprotester in Charlottesville. In context, however, it is clear the president did not attempt to “both sides” the issue.
“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis,” Trump told reporters. “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 may even disagree that some supporters of Gen. Lee are “fine people.” But Trump has made abundantly clear that that is all he meant to say. There were fine people there who did not want the statue torn down — not that the neo-Nazis, who, frankly, dominated and embodied the spirit of that terrifying 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.”
He added, “Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group.”
“If you look,” he said, “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. The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people — neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them.”
Pressed to clarify, the president expanded on his earlier remarks.
“You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest, and very legally protest,” he said of the original group of people who gathered to protest the removal of the Gen. Lee statue. “There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country — a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country.”
Alcindor is a White House correspondent. You would think that she would at least take the time to familiarize herself with the transcripts. But that is obviously too much to expect.
