Your desperate yes or no phrasing of the question crumbles in the face of.......
It is true, as the Snopes headline indicates, that Trump said that he was not talking about the white nationalists when offering praise for some of the participants in Unite the Right. But as The Washington Post’s Fact Checker pointed out in a 2020 assessment of the controversy, it’s not clear that there were any participants who weren’t allied with the white nationalist elements that announced the rally in the first place. The Washington Post reported Aug. 10 that there would be a “white nationalist rally” in Charlottesville; does someone who attends a white nationalist rally deserve rhetorical distance from white nationalism?
The reason that “very fine people” lingers over Trump is that it is a shorthand for his eagerness to downplay the explicit pro-Trump, white nationalist origins of a protest that led to a woman being killed.
He was “exonerated” to the extent that he said he was not talking about the white nationalists but, instead, about theoretical people who joined a white-nationalist-led rally. He was not exonerated on assigning blame for the brawling to both to neo-Nazis and those protesting the neo-Nazis. He was not exonerated for suggesting that Heyer’s death was part of violence on “many sides.” He was not exonerated for suggesting that the counterprotesters’ lack of a rally permit somehow established moral equivalence with those they were protesting.
Incidentally, it's also not true that Tapper ever “debunked” Trump's comments. In the 2019 CNN segment linked by Trump's team on Truth Social, Tapper goes on to raise the same point made above.
“Again, he didn't refer to Nazis as very fine people. He referred to the people protesting with the Nazis,” Tapper said. “And I don't know who are the good people there. Friday night was 'the Jews will not replace us.' Saturday, somebody was killed. At what point were there good people there?”
Trump’s team didn’t include that part in the video it shared.
THAT remains a smart, informed, take on a point you continue to struggle and fail to make.
AI
