Trump stuns in off-script tirade

President derails press conference, defends white supremacists in speech that leaves aides slack-jawed

WASHINGTON— He had said the words everyone told him he needed to say. He had denounced white supremacists.

The white supremacists kept smiling. They said Donald Trump was clearly insincere about the words he had read from a script. The racists were right. In an impromptu tirade so astonishing it left his chief of staff staring at the floor of Trump Tower, the president revealed Tuesday that he did not actually believe white supremacists were solely responsible for the Saturday violence at their rally in Charlottesville, Va.

Some of the violence, Trump claimed, was initiated by bat-wielding leftist “troublemakers.” Some of the participants in the rally, he insisted, were “very fine peo- ple.”

And the nominal reason for the event, he suggested, was just: defending “history” and “culture” from people who want to take down statues of Confederate icons.

Trump’s words were nearly indistinguishable from those of the white supremacists themselves. The rant left former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke ecstatic, Democrats and Republicans slack-jawed and sickened.

Here was the president passionately defending an extremist event during which an alleged admirer of Adolf Hitler was accused of murdering a peaceful protester and injuring 19 others.

Here was the president using weaker words to describe the people bearing swastikas than the people who showed up to oppose them.

“You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and it was horrible. And it was a horrible thing to watch,” Trump said.

“But there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left — you’ve just called them the left — that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.

“I watched those very closely,” he said, “much more closely than you people watched it.”

Trump’s Monday speech had quieted the Republican legislators who had joined the national outcry over the Saturday speech in which Trump had pointed to violence “on many sides.”

“But there is another side, you can call them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.” U.S. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP

The Tuesday revision — essentially the Saturday statement unleashed — triggered a new round of condemnation from his congressional allies, some of it tinged with resignation.

“I don’t understand what’s so hard about this,” Ohio Rep. Steve Stivers, chairman of the party’s congressional election committee, said on Twitter. “White supremacists and neoNazis are evil and shouldn’t be defended.”

As always, it was not clear whether Trump’s colleagues would do anything other than offer verbal rebukes. But the president’s latest remarks appeared, at least, to create a more severe crisis of confidence than he has previously faced as president, with even his aides pronouncing themselves “stunned” in anonymous remarks to U.S. reporters.

In a highly unusual statement, the commandant of the Marine Corps, Robert Neller, took to Twitter to declare there was “no place for racial hatred or extremism” in the service.

“Just stopped on roadside to read @POTUS remarks. I nearly threw up,” Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said on Twitter. “FYI, after today, White House staff have effectively been folded into the white supremacy propaganda operation. Your choice — stay or go.”

However sincere Trump aides’ professions of shock, the president’s words were unsurprising to critics who have noted his long history of public bigotry, from smearing Mexican migrants as “rapists” to promoting a racist conspiracy about Barack Obama’s birthplace.

“As Maya Angelou said, when people show you who they are, believe them the first time,” Democratic Rep. Cedric Richmond, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Trump spoke after another round of criticism from corporate leaders. The chief executive of Walmart, Doug McMillon, issued a statement saying Trump’s initial speech had “missed a critical opportunity to help bring our country together by unequivocally rejecting the appalling actions of white supremacists.”

Among the officials to resign from Trump’s manufacturing advisory council on Tuesday was the leader of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

“It’s the right thing for me to do,” Scott Paul said on Twitter.

Trump’s rant was all the more remarkable for the context: a brief speech, at his home skyscraper in New York, that was supposed to be about infrastructure. Just minutes before his eruption, Trump had held up a flow chart while talking about how he planned to speed up the pace of projects.

Standing nearby was chief of staff John Kelly, the retired general he hired three weeks prior in an attempt to impose some semblance of discipline on his dysfunctional administration.

But Trump himself has always chafed at attempts to corral him. Kelly stood helplessly, arms folded and eyes down, as Trump became more and more agitated while taking questions from the media.

At first, he simply argued that he had not waited too long to condemn the white supremacists. He said he needed to make sure he had “the facts” — though he had been quick to jump to the conclusion that previous incidents were acts of terrorism, even when they were not.

Growing angrier, he then told reporters that they did not yet have all the facts themselves. Finally, and at length, he offered his own version of what happened and who was present.

“Not all of those people were neoNazis, believe me,” Trump said. “Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”

The Charlottesville rally featured people waving Nazi flags, members of the white supremacist “alt-right” dressed in casual attire and heavily armed militiamen in military-style uniforms.

Those people were merely opposed, Trump said, to the removal of a Charlottesville statue of Robert E. Lee, the general who commanded the forces of the pro-slavery Confederate secessionists.

In his most explicit endorsement of Confederate icons, Trump argued that removing monuments would lead the country down a slippery slope to the removal of monuments to beloved founding fathers.

“George Washington was a slave owner,” he said. “So will George Washington, now, lose his status?”

“How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?”