Trump again lays blame on both sides
Remarks on marches where counterprotester was killed hailed by white supremacists
NEW YORK — 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 at 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, after an announcement about infrastructure. “I
had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters.”
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.”
His remarks were welcomed by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who tweeted: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth.”
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 the Confederate general 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, before suggesting that Lee and other Confederate-era generals, including Stonewall Jackson, are the victims of historical revisionism attempting to delegitimize their roles.
“So, this week, it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder: Is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really do have to ask yourself, ‘Where does it stop?'” Trump asked, noting that Washington and Jefferson were slave owners. “You're changing history; you're changing culture,” he said.
His statements echoed an exchange Monday night on Fox News between former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the show's host, Martha MacCallum.
“Where are you going to stop it?” Gingrich said. “You want to say, ‘What if you weren't sensitive enough to the Holocaust, we should take down all the statues of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?' You could make an argument for that.”
Trump's statements also mirrored a post Monday by the publisher of The Daily Stormer, a notorious neoNazi website.
“These ‘protests' are happening across the country,” Andrew Anglin wrote after a Confederate monument was taken down Monday in Durham, North Carolina. “And I guarantee you, they are going to go to Washington, and they are going to demand that the Washington Monument be torn down. They might even try to pull it down. Because George Washington owned slaves. More importantly, he was a white man who built something.”
Anglin's site takes its name from Der Stürmer, a newspaper that published Nazi propaganda. The site includes sections called “Jewish Problem” and “Race War.”
Google canceled the domain name registration of The Daily Stormer on Monday after Anglin published a post mocking the woman killed in a deadly attack at the Charlottesville rally, calling her “fat” and “childless.”
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 alt-right — do they have any semblance of guilt?” Trump said. “They came charging, clubs in hand, swinging clubs.”
As Trump talked, 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.
As Trump finally walked away from his lectern, he 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.