Trump spreads blame around
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday forcefully blamed counterprotesters as well as white supremacist groups for the weekend’s deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., abandoning his scripted condemnation just a day earlier of the neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups widely seen as responsible.
Trump reverted instead to his initial stance, which he articulated just after a woman died on Saturday when a car allegedly driven by a white supremacist sped through counterprotesters and pedestrians. In that first reaction, he faulted “many sides” for the violence— igniting two days of bipartisan criticism that Trump sought to answer with Monday’s unequivocal denunciation of white supremacists.
On Tuesday, the president called his Saturday response “a fine statement.”
In a combative and caustic exchange with reporters at Trump Tower, the president described what he saw televised from Charlottesville: “You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent.
“And nobody wants to say that,” he continued, “but I’ll say it right now.”
Trump also expressed common cause with Confederate sympathizers and others working in a number of Southern communities to preserve monuments to Confederate heroes, as many locales act to take them down as a gesture of racial healing.
It was a plan in Charlottesville to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that brought the white supremacists there from all over the nation for the rally Saturday.
“This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed Stonewall Jackson is coming down,” Trump said, alluding to another Confederate general. “I wonder — is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
His statements brought a “thank you” from former Klan leader David Duke, but once again provoked widespread opposition, including among many Republicans who expressed anguish at Trump’s rhetoric.
The remarks amounted to another surreal moment in a presidency that has been full of them, in this case driving a new wedge into the nation’s racial divide. Trump, standing in the gilded lobby of Trump Tower in New York for the first time since his inauguration, beside two Cabinet secretaries and two economic advisers there to discuss infrastructure, grew defensive and angry when reporters asked him repeatedly about his initial failure, for two days, to unequivocally condemn the white supremacists.
He defended himself for the delay - “I didn’t wait long; I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct” - yet he in effect disavowed the Monday statement denouncing the white supremacists in Charlottesville that he had made after presumably getting “the facts,” as he put it.
Then he reached into his suit coat, brandished a copy of his prepared remarks from Saturday, and approvingly read the most pertinent line: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.”