Trump doubles down on his Charlottesville 'very fine people' lie

by Kerry Eleveld

Community

Friday, Apr. 26, 2019 Friday, Apr. 26, 2019 at 1:26:03pm PDT

WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA - APRIL 18: US President Donald Trump waves to supporters after arriving on Air Force One at the Palm Beach International Airport to spend Easter weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort on April 18, 2019 in West Palm Beach, Florida. President Trump arrived as the report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was released by Attorney General William P. Bar earlier today in Washington, DC. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

They carried tiki torches. They chanted the Nazi slogan "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us!" One of them rammed a car into a crowd of people and murdered a woman. But when Donald Trump was asked Friday if he still stood by his original characterization of the neo-Nazis who stormed Charlottesville in 2017 as "very fine people," he sought to paint the white nationalist agitators as a benign historic preservation movement.

“I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, the great general,” Trump told reporters. “People were there protesting the taking down of the monument Robert E. Lee.”

Oh, yes, big history buffs—who donned fatigues, semi-automatics, and stood across from a synagogue chanting "Sieg heil!" until congregants were advised to escape through a back door.

In fact, Lee was really beside the point for the organizers of the rally.

Reporter Jane Coastan tweets: "I went back through a ton of Unite the Right material (a lot of it gathered via lawsuits filed after the event) and it’s amazing how little anyone discussed the Lee statue that was allegedly the point of the event." She includes a Unite The Right poster for the rally with a rendering of a glorified chiseled white man wearing a blazer hovering above ralliers. Robert E. Lee and his monument aren

As Vox's Jan Coaston documented, the Unite the Right rally was explicitly intended to be a "far-right, racist, and white supremacist event"—a goal that quickly eclipsed anything having to do with the Lee monument. Here's the way the extremist site the Daily Stormer described the upcoming rally on Aug. 8, 2017.

Although the rally was initially planned in support of the Lee Monument, which the Jew Mayor and his Negroid Deputy have marked for destruction, it has become something much bigger than that. It is now an historic rally, which will serve as a rallying point and battle cry for the rising Alt-Right movement.

Now you can listen to the gaslighter in chief revisit the event and how he originally described it "perfectly," in his own view.

Trump defended his response to the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 when he said there were Ã¢ÂÂvery fine people on both sides.Ã¢ÂÂ

He said the was talking about people who Ã¢ÂÂfelt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee. A great general, whether you like it or not.Ã¢ÂÂ pic.twitter.com/fulPWpY4zC
— POLITICO (@politico) April 26, 2019

Here’s the reality.

In case you forgot what really happened in Charlottesville https://t.co/gCXflb8NvU pic.twitter.com/VHZoKSvzPz
— VICE News (@vicenews) April 26, 2019