Let me make this clear: This isn’t about whether Trump said Nazis were fine people. He didn’t. It’s about whether he invented the existence of such fine people where there weren’t any.
The second anniversary of the Charlottesville riots passed on Monday, but President Trump couldn’t leave bad enough alone.
On Tuesday he retweeted, with a “thank you” message, a misleading video that attempts to defend his much-maligned reactions to that racially charged tragedy.
The reality, despite the misdirection offered by Trump’s defenders, is that Trump, for whatever reason, went out of his way to recast the tragedy in ways that were fundamentally dishonest.
According to the new video and a growing meme among the pro-Trump commentariat, Trump is actually a victim of bad reporting about his comments in 2017. In those comments, Trump said he “condemned totally” the “neo-Nazis and white nationalists,” but then infamously insisted there were “very fine people on both sides” during the two days of protests and counterprotests….
…Again and again in the press conference, Trump insisted on the supposed existence of these peaceful protesters… The problem is, there’s no evidence they really existed in Charlottesville that weekend, and certainly not that there were “many” of them….
The kicker is that Trump insisted that the very fine people specifically were at the rally the night before Heyer was killed by a neo-Nazi. He said it twice. That is howlingly false. The night before was the rally in which white nationalists by the hundreds marched in paramilitary order, bearing weapons, holding aloft tiki torches, yelling racist and anti-Semitic epithets.
The media should defy Trump to produce one single video, just one, of “very fine people” and “innocent” protesters in that group. ….
[This is important. The full, fact-based analysis is laid out carefully in the full column, at this link.]
