Writer Michael Wolff’s popular look into President Donald Trump's administration, Fire and Fury, alleges Trump tried to rationalize the reasons a person would join the Ku Klux Klan after the Unite the Right rally back in August 2017. 

As many could recall, thousands of white nationalists, Confederate sympathizers, neo-Nazis and KKK members descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the planned removal of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue.

Tensions mounted as this group of various white supremacists clashed with Antifa protesters over the course of two days, resulting in the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer.  

“As [Trump] got back on Marine One to head to Andrews Air Force Base and on to JFK and then into Manhattan and Trump Tower, [after addressing the Charlottesville murder,] his mood was dark and I-told-you-so," Wolff wrote.

"Privately, he kept trying to rationalize why someone would be a member of the KKK — that is, they might not actually believe what the KKK believed, and the KKK probably does not believe what it used to believe, and, anyway, who really knows what the KKK believes now?”

The quote puts the president's thinking into perspective.

After the initial response from the White House, Trump claimed there was violence on both sides although white nationalist James Alex Fields drove his vehicle in a crowd of protesters and bystanders that resulted in the death of Heyer and 19 injured people.   

Wolff also states in the book that Trump's White House was dysfunctional and that everyone around “all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”