FACT CHECK: Yes, Trump Praised the Nazis in Charlottesville
Sorry, Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, but Trump absolutely did praise neo-Nazis, and it's not actually a 'hoax.'
One of the many annoying things about Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House is having to rehash facts that should have been settled long ago. Here's one: in August 2017, after a deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump claimed there were “very fine people on both sides,” praising the racists responsible for the violence.
The backlash was immediate. Trump’s Republican allies distanced themselves. CEOs quit his advisory councils. A White House arts committee disbanded and called on the president to resign. For about two years, this incident stood as a glaring example of Trump’s coddling of white supremacists.
Then came the revisionist spin. Weaving together a handful of moments, cherry-picked from days of typically Trumpian contradictions and doublespeak, the president’s defenders weaved together an alternate narrative. Trump condemned Nazis, they argued. He was merely defending peaceful, non-racist protesters who opposed removing a statue of Robert E. Lee. The idea that the whole thing was a hoax has become an article of faith on the right (just watch the video above). On a podcast taped the day before last month’s election, Elon Musk could work Joe Rogan into a frenzy simply by invoking the phrase “fine people.”
MUSK: The Dems are like, ‘Oh, we’re the good guys. We’re the honest people.’ No, no. Hang on. You can’t claim to be the honest people if you’re deliberately pushing hoaxes that have been debunked thoroughly … like the ‘fine people’ hoax.
ROGAN: Obama just said that on stage. … That’s a flat-out goddamn lie. Flat out fucking lie.
But it isn’t a lie. Here’s what happened, for the next time Rogan needs his producer to pull facts up.
The Facts
On Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, white supremacists from across the country held a rally called “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville, the central Virginia college town home to the state’s flagship public university. As the name suggests, their goal was to unite neo-Nazis, the KKK, and other hate groups with the broader pro-Trump movement.
Nominally, the event was tied to a local debate about removing Confederate statues, erected half a century after the Civil War as monuments to segregation, from the city’s public parks. But as the organizers said in internal chats, later revealed in court: “The rally was never about the Lee statue … It’s about increasing our ability to exploit circumstances in the real world and attract more activists to our cause.” Promotional posters made the event’s true purpose clear: to “end Jewish influence in America” and to create “a pivotal moment for the pro-white movement.” Several of the white nationalists wore MAGA hats, hoping to signal solidarity with the president.
August 11
As the evidence presented in court made clear, Nazis were planning violence from the start. On the night of Aug. 11, hundreds of white supremacists carrying tiki torches marched through the grounds of the University of Virginia, chanting the old German Nazi slogan “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” This protest had nothing to do with the Lee statue – it was over a mile away. Instead, they surrounded a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, where a small group of unarmed anti-racist counterprotesters had gathered. The Nazis attacked them with pepper spray and fists until police broke it up.
August 12
The main rally took place the next day, Aug. 12. This time, more white supremacists came armed with shields, clubs, and helmets. Far-right militias provided additional security for the Nazis; at least one leftist community defense organization brought guns as well. Violence broke out all over the city, including the brutal beating of 20-year-old DeAndre Harris by white supremacists. That afternoon, James Alex Fields, a neo-Nazi from Ohio, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more.
All eyes were now on Trump. The white supremacists had explicitly appealed to the president during the rally. David Duke had told reporters on the morning of Aug. 12: “We're going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That's why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he's going to take our country back.”
Trump seemed to live up to Duke’s hopes when, a few hours after the car attack, he made his first public statement, vaguely criticizing “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides. On many sides.” He didn’t mention Fields’ car attack or the white supremacist violence. Instead, he tried to reject responsibility, saying: “It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama.” When reporters pressed him to denounce the Nazis, he walked out. The Neo-Nazi blog Daily Stormer celebrated: “Really, really good. God bless him.”
August 14
The reaction was fierce. Prominent Republicans demanded stronger condemnation. On Aug. 14, Trump issued a second statement, condemning “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups.” But his flat tone and the two-day delay left the public unconvinced – and the Nazis unfazed. Prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer dismissed it as “kumbaya nonsense” meant only for public relations.
August 15
This was the backdrop for the third press event: the now-infamous Aug. 15 press conference at Trump Tower. (I encourage you to watch the press conference below.) What was supposed to be a news conference about infrastructure turned into Trump’s impassioned defense of his days of earlier comments. In a familiar pattern, Trump both doubled down and contradicted himself, insisting his first statement was “fine” and accusing critics of spreading “fake news.” He lashed out at reporters, repeatedly reminding them he had condemned neo-Nazis – albeit belatedly – while simultaneously blaming the left for the violence.
When a reporter interjected to note, correctly, that the “neo-Nazis started this thing,” Trump launched into the key section of his comments:
TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
The first part was confusing. The Nazis “didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis” – to whom? Not to the city that issued the permit, knowing they were white nationalists; nor to the American Civil Liberties Union, who defended them. But the second part was a clear escalation of Trump’s rhetoric. Not only was he making the Nazis and some of the people they’d harmed out to be equivalently bad, but it sounded like he was making at least some of the Nazis out to be equivalently good.
As reporters shouted follow-up questions, Trump elaborated, claiming that among the neo-Nazis were people “there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.” He added, in the line that is most often cited as exoneration: “You had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?”
This could be a compelling argument. There’s just one problem: There has never been a shred of evidence produced showing that there was any discernable number of non-Nazi/pro-statue protesters on the streets of Charlottesville that weekend. Pressed for evidence, Trump referenced supposedly widely seen footage from “the night before” – Aug. 11. But the only public protest that night in Charlottesville, a town that is barely 10 square miles in area, was the Nazi torch rally.
I’ve spent years hunting for any kind of proof of what Trump described as a “very quiet,” non-Nazi, pro-statue rally that night or the next day. What I’ve found is that, when asked, Trump’s online defenders invariably dig up photos of the Nazis themselves – or of the counterprotesters they attacked.
What likely happened is simple: Stung by criticism, Trump made up a story to excuse his original “both sides” remark. Either he saw footage of Nazis and decided there were "very fine people" among them, or he lied about having seen such images altogether.
Whatever he was thinking, Trump gave away the game during that third press conference by emphasizing that the pro-statue group he was praising had a legal permit for their rally. That permit was issued to Jason Kessler, the neo-Nazi organizer of Unite the Right. In other words, the group that Trump lauded – the one he said was there “to innocently protest and very legally protest” – was a Nazi rally. End of story.
Trump on Repeat
As Musk noted on Rogan a month ago, Snopes.com weighed in on this question this year. The site’s reporter took the revisionist way out, saying that Trump could not have been referring to the Nazis as “very fine people,” since he also said they should be “condemned totally.” Musk failed to note that, when readers responded by putting both those comments in their full context, Snopes appended an editor’s note, saying: “Virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong.”
The best defense you can make of Trump is that he accidentally defended a group of Nazis and other white nationalists in the aftermath of a rally where they savagely beat and killed residents of an American city; and then, when criticized, either made up or hallucinated a third group of people who never existed to use as an excuse. (And if you’re going to cite an Aug. 16, 2017, New York Times article that purported to find such a person, you should know that article was wrong.)
It’s more likely that Trump knew that some of the white nationalists were his supporters and did not want to push them away, so long as the trade-offs to his reputation weren’t too high. Having gotten away with it in Charlottesville thanks to the help of his supporters and credulous media, Trump would employ the same move again and again: with the Proud Boys in his first re-election bid, with a white supremacist dinner guest in the interregnum, and so on.
Last month, Trump tapped Fox News host Pete Hegseth as his nominee for secretary of defense. After the Charlottesville riot, Hegseth openly sympathized with neo-Nazis' racial grievances on air, describing them as “young white men” who believed they were being treated unfairly in America. He didn’t even bother to frame their actions as a color-blind defense of Confederate statues. In the next Trump administration, such thinly veiled excuses might be things of the past.
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It is scary how many top military officials who worked under trump during his first term can collaborate these claims. And still his fan base doesn’t care. According to cnn “The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, told Bob Woodward in his new book “War” that the former president “is the most dangerous person to this country … A fascist to the core.”
We need more pure facts and honesty like this. Glad to see all the research put together in one good story. We are going to need these kinds of stories during 45-47 term. I have hope we can all survive him and them!