Trump insists both sides are to blame
President says two groups at protest acted irresponsibly.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that counterprotesters at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville acted violently and should share the blame for the mayhem that left a woman dead and many injured.
Speaking in the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan, the president called the events of Saturday at the “Unite the Right” rally a “horrible thing to watch,” but he emphasized that both sides acted irresponsibly.
“You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” Trump said. “No one wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now: You had a group on
the other side that came charging
in without a permit and they were very, very violent.”
Trump’s remarks came a day after he belatedly condemned the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other hate groups that organized and participated in the rally. He had faced mounting pressure from lawmakers and civil rights groups over his failure to do so during his initial reaction to the violence, when he denounced violence “on many sides.”
But Tuesday, Trump defended his handling of the Charlottesville situation, stating he did not want to jump to conclusions in his initial remarks.
“There was no way of making a correct statement that early,” he said in an impromptu news conference in the lobby of Trump Tower, adding that “before I make a statement, I like to know the facts.”
Trump called the driver of the car that killed counterprotester Heather Heyer, 32, and injured 19 a “disgrace to himself, his family and the country,” but he stopped short of declaring the action a case of “domestic terrorism,” calling that an exercise in semantics. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said that the act fits that definition, and the Justice Department has launched a federal civil rights probe into Heyer’s death.
Prosecutors have charged James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio, who has reportedly espoused Nazi propaganda and participated in the rally, with the crime.
“You can call it terrorism. You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want,” Trump said. “I call it the fastest outcome to a good verdict . ... You get into legal semantics. The driver of the car was a murderer. What he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.”
Trump emphasized repeatedly that he believed many of the “Unite the Right” rally participants were not members of hate groups and were there to protest the pending removal by the city of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
“You had people in that group who were protesting the taking down of what to them is a very, very important statue,” Trump said. “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”
He suggested that Lee and other Confederate-era generals, including Stonewall Jackson, are the victims of historical revisionism attempting to delegitimize their roles.
Speaking rhetorically, Trump asked reporters whether George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both slave owners, should suffer the same fate and have their statues removed. “You’re changing history; you’re changing culture,” he said.
Trump reiterated his condemnation of Nazis and other white supremacists. But he also made clear that he believed that some of the counterprotesters were armed and took aggressive actions that helped spark the violence.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at the altright — do they have any semblance of guilt?” Trump said. “They came charging, clubs in hand, swinging clubs.”
His statements drew both condemnation and praise.
“Blaming ‘both sides’ for #Charlottesville?! No,” wrote Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla. “Back to relativism when dealing with KKK, Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists? Just no.”
“No words,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.
David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, characterized Trump’s comments as a condemnation of “leftist terrorists.”
“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville,” Duke said in a Twitter post.
As Trump spoke, his aides on the sidelines of the lobby stood in silence. Chief of staff John Kelly crossed his arms and stared down at his shoes, barely glancing at the president. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders looked around the room trying to make eye contact with other senior aides. One young staffer stood with her mouth agape.
Strolling away from the lectern as he ended the press conference, Trump stopped to answer one more shouted question: Would he visit Charlottesville? The president’s response was to note that he owned property there and to say it was one of the largest wineries in the United States.