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Trump says hate groups will be held accountable
Amid furor after Va. death, president calls racism ‘evil’
President Donald Trump on Monday for the first time explicitly blamed white supremacists for the “racist violence” over the weekend in Virginia.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday answered two days of bipartisan furor over his initial response to deadly protests in Charlottesville, Va., with a new statement for the first time explicitly blaming white supremacists for the “racist violence” over the weekend.
“Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” the president said in a roughly twominute statement, reading from a teleprompter at the White House.
“To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered,” Trump added.
The president’s statement was a hastily arranged do-over that implicitly acknowledged the need to stanch the self-inflicted damage his first reaction had caused him and his administration.
Criticism and outrage had continued to build, including among Republicans, to Trump’s Saturday remarks blaming “many sides” — in effect lumping together for fault the antiracism counter-protesters with the gun-wielding white supremacy groups Trump declined to name.
The episode has emerged as another defining moment in the young Trump presidency, one in which critics across the political spectrum faulted the president for failing to lead with moral clarity to unify the country amid civil strife. Trump’s initial remarks had prompted stalwart conservatives such as Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch to distance themselves or rebuke the president outright, while the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer praised him for saying “nothing specific against us.”
Adding to the pressure for the White House, just ahead of the president’s scripted comments, a Virginia judge in Charlottesville declined to set bail for 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr., who is charged with murdering a woman and injuring 20 others by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter-protesters and pedestrians Saturday.
Even before he belatedly spoke against the white nationalists, however, Trump drew more criticism for a tweet early Monday in which he attacked Kenneth Frazier, the African-American chief executive of the pharmaceutical company Merck, within an hour of Frazier’s resignation from a White House manufacturing council to protest Trump’s initial failure to explicitly condemn the racists in Charlottesville.
The president had told reporters on Friday that he’d hold a “pretty big press conference on Monday,” but after the weekend’s events no press conference was on his official Monday schedule. Instead, by mid-morning the White House circulated word that Trump would make a statement on Charlottesville.
Once he came to the lectern with the presidential seal, the president first took some time to extol his administration as he often does for various economic gains. After segueing to roughly two minutes of remarks denouncing the hate groups, Trump pivoted and left, ignoring reporters’ shouted questions as he had Saturday, including several asking if he regretted his delay in specifically blaming the racists.
White House aides declined to respond to requests for information, including about why the president’s promised press conference was canceled.
Prior to his public statement, Trump met privately with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and new FBI Director Christopher Wray to discuss the civil rights investigation of the two days of chaos in Charlottesville that the Justice Department announced late Saturday.
After his Saturday statement, Trump continued to tweet through the weekend and into Monday, mostly on other subjects; those referring to Charlottesville did not denounce or even refer to white nationalists.
On social media, critics noted the contrast between Trump’s quick condemnation of Merck’s Frazier and his failure — to that point — to denounce racist groups by name. Frazier said he felt “a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism.”
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said that Trump “proves again he’s capable of immediate and personal condemnation. Why not for white supremacists?”
In New York, where Trump planned to spend the night in his first stay in Trump Tower as president, protesters converged for blocks around the high-rise, shouting “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco said in a statement, “It shouldn’t take the President of the United States two days to summon the basic decency to condemn murder and violence by Nazis and white supremacists.”