Trump repeats claim both sides at blame in Charlottesville
President describes conversation with black S.C. senator.
President Donald Trump thrust himself back into the racial storms of Charlottesville on Thursday, repeating his charge that those resisting the neo-Nazis and white supremacists were as much to blame as the altright crowds who marched on the Virginia college town last month.
Trump was characterizing his side of a conversation on Wednesday with Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, during which Scott, the Senate’s only black Republican, said he confronted the president on his claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence that followed a torchlight protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
“Especially in light of the advent of Antifa, if you look at what’s going on there, you know, you have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also,” Trump said, referring to the anti-fascist group that clashed with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Trump has offered constantly shifting statements about Charlottesville, alternately condemning the hate groups and declaring a moral equivalence between them and the counterprotesters.
On Thursday, speaking to reporters on Air Force One, he reverted to the unapologetic stance he took in a news conference last month at Trump Tower.
“Now because of what’s happened since then, with Antifa, you look at really what’s happened since Charlottesville — a lot of people are saying — in fact, a lot of people have actually written, ‘Gee, Trump might have point,’” Trump said. “I said, ‘You’ve got some very bad people on the other side, which is true.’”
Still, Trump said, he and Scott had a “great conversation.”
In his remarks to reporters a day earlier, Scott made it clear he went to the White House to rebut Trump’s claim that “both sides” were responsible.
“My response was that, while that’s true, I mean I think if you look at it from a sterile perspective, there was an antagonist on the other side,” Scott said. “However, the real picture has nothing to do with who is on the other side.”
“It has to do with the affirmation of hate groups who over three centuries of this country’s history have made it their mission to create upheaval in minority communities as their reason for existence,” he said. “I shared my thoughts of the last three centuries of challenges from white supremacists, white nationalists, KKK, Nazis. So there’s no way to find an equilibrium when you have three centuries of history versus the situation that is occurring today.”