Thanks to an uncharacteristically naive post from fact-checking website Snopes, gaslighter-in-chief Donald Trump is trying to convince the public that his response to Heather Heyer’s 2017 murder in Charlottesville, Virginia, wasn’t morally bankrupt.
Heyer was among a crowd of leftist counterprotesters opposing the Unite the Right rally, which was protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. James Alex Fields, who had a reported fascination with Hitler and Nazism, rammed his car into the counterprotesters, injuring more than 30 people and killing Heyer. Trump is citing Snopes to say that President Joe Biden and everybody else with common sense is misconstruing Trump’s infamous statement that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the day’s clashes.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?”
Apparently, it’s important to Trump that he convince people that his response to the racist, murderous violence in Charlottesville wasn’t beneath the office of the presidency. And it’s just as important to Biden that we remember not only Trump’s awful response to that day but also that it characterizes who he was as a president and who he would be if he were elected again.
At their June 27 CNN debate, Biden, as he’s done at multiple campaign stops, cited Trump’s response to Charlottesville as the reason he decided to run for the 2020 Democratic nomination and engage in what he called “a battle for the soul of America.”
Trump, apparently referring to Snopes, replied that Biden “made up the Charlottesville story, and you’ll see it’s debunked all over the place. Every anchor has — every reasonable anchor has debunked it. And just the other day it came out where it was fully debunked. It’s a nonsense story. He knows that. And he didn’t run because of Charlottesville. He used that as an excuse to run.”
Snopes argues that because Trump later in his statement explicitly condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists, it’s wrong to say he was categorizing them as “fine people.” One imagines Snopes summarizing Marc Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech as “Aide calls Caesar’s killers ‘honorable men.’”
While it’s the job of the fact-checker to fuss over the smallest details, it’s the job of the truth-teller to include the larger context. Trump’s comments came three days after Heyer’s murder; in a foreshadowing of Jan. 6, 2021, he was being criticized for a response that was slow and insufficiently outraged. The context is also that Trump, as we’ve long known, defines “very fine people” as those who like him and very bad people as those who don’t.
Was there anybody on Heyer’s side that fateful day who didn’t detest Trump? Probably not. Was there anybody on the “Unite the Right” side, the Robert E. Lee side, who wouldn’t support Trump? That’s just as doubtful. In fact, that rally was attended by the likes of people who’d illegally fight for him to hold on to power on Jan. 6, 2021. Thus, it made a certain sense for Trump, who’s the embodiment of amorality, to ask a reporter that same day, “What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?”
And also say: “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, 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.”
To Snopes’ point, yes, Trump did clear the hurdle of saying Nazis were bad: “I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.” Then he said, “Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee.”
It should be considered a truism of political demonstration that you can’t control everybody who joins your protest. If the goal of your protest is noble and people causing mayhem glom onto it, then there’s an argument to make that those interlopers’ bad behavior shouldn’t be ascribed to you. However, the “Unite the Right” rally was organized, in part, by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who coined the term “alt-right,” spread his noxious white-nationalist gospel on college campuses and made a show of doing a Nazi-style “hail Trump!” cheer during a conference. Apparently the “fine people” innocently tagged along.
“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, 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.”
Given their history as looming emblems of white Southerners’ power over disenfranchised Black people after Reconstruction, I believe Confederate monuments are problematic in just about every context. But even if I could conceive of “fine people” marching for Lee in 2017, I couldn’t conceive of them aligning themselves with a Spencer-sponsored event. Joining a rally a white nationalist helped organize is sufficient proof that the attendees are not “fine people.”
Trump hasn’t announced his choice of running mate yet, but by suggesting that his Charlottesville remarks weren’t an abject failure, he’s undercutting the case of one of the candidates he’s presumed to be considering. At the time, Trump’s “fine people on both sides" remarks prompted Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., to say: “What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority. And that moral authority is compromised.”
Scott told Fox News last week that after he called out Trump’s refusal to effectively distinguish right from wrong, Trump “invited me to the Oval Office to talk about race relations in America.” He said Trump listened and said, "‘Help me help those I have offended.’” Scott said, “It was the Charlottesville incident that made our relationship what it is today.”
That may be as good a reason as any to pick against Scott for vice president. He wouldn’t be able to tell the story of his closeness to Trump without describing a moment that illustrates why Trump should never be president again.