FOX News tried again to explain away one of Trump’s many deplorable statements. This time it was Charlottesville. The president at the time (August 12th 2017) drew a moral equivalence between Neo-NAZIs and counter protesters on that fateful day when a protester was killed by a white supremacist driving his car into a crowd. Trump tried, and failed, to exculpate the racist groups involved in the ‘United the Right’ rally. This is FOX’s latest contribution to cover for the ex-president:
The left-leaning fact checking website Snopes acknowledged Saturday that former President Trump never called neo-Nazis “very fine people” during his press conference following the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.
Critics of Trump have claimed for years that he equated neo-Nazis with counterprotesters following the event. President Biden was chief among those critics, citing the supposed incident as a main reason for launching his 2020 campaign.
“While Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’ Therefore, we have rated this claim ‘False,'” Snopes wrote.
This article is in stark contrast with FOX’s reporting in 2017, after the incident:
…president’s retorts Tuesday suggested he had been a reluctant participant in that cleanup effort and renewed questions about why he seemed to struggle to unequivocally condemn white nationalists.
Members of his own Republican Party have pressured him to be more vigorous in criticizing bigoted groups, and business leaders have begun abandoning a White House jobs panel in response to his comments.
When asked to explain his Saturday comments about Charlottesville, Trump looked down at his notes and again read a section of his initial statement that denounced bigotry but did not single out white supremacists. He then tucked the paper back into his jacket pocket.
So which is it, did he denounce the Neo-NAZIs or didn’t he? Sounds like he was inclined to avoid criticizing them. Thus, the ‘both sides’ comment that led to an uproar by most Americans after a woman was killed by a racist terrorist.
It was only after receiving broad criticism for his initial comments that Trump changed his tune. This was from ABC News then:
President Donald Trump condemned hate groups, including white supremacists, in remarks from the White House on Monday, after receiving criticism for his initial statement on the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend.
…Trump’s immediate response to the violence, which did not label the ramming an act of terrorism or include a denunciation of white supremacists, was met with bipartisan backlash. In remarks on the rally and subsequent clashes from his golf club in New Jersey on Saturday, he condemned the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”
The Neo-NAZIs praised Trump’s for his ‘both sides’ excuse:
White supremacists and neo-Nazi groups enthusiastically embraced President Donald Trump Wednesday, seeing an endorsement of their cause in his insistence that left-wing groups were also to blame for the deadly violence at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“This man is doing absolutely everything in his power to back us up and we need to have his back,” Andrew Anglin wrote on the DailyStormer, a neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic website that acts as a hub of the extreme right.
“It’s going to be really, really hard to have any bad feelings towards Trump for a long, long time after this,” he said.
The 99 Percenters 