President Donald Trump defended his statements following the August 2017 protest in Charlottesville, VA. After protests turned violent and counter protest, Heather Heyer, was killed when a right wing protestor drove his car into a crowd.
In response to the act, President Trump gave a news conference in which he assigned blame and very fine people “on both sides.”
“You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now,” the president said at a Trump Tower news conference after the 2017 protest. “You look at both sides. I think there is blame on both sides. I have no doubt about it. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”
In defense of his comments lauded praise on the original stated reason for the “Unite The Right” rally, Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
"I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general," Trump said leaving the White House. "Whether you like it or not, he was a great general."
While the original reason for the protests was removal of a monument to the confederate general, promotion of the rally on Neo-Nazi websites such as the Daily Stormer called on protestors to “end Jewish influence in America.”
"People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee," he added. "Everybody knows that."
The comments were brought back into the public consciousness after Former Vice President Joe Biden criticized the comments in his announcement video for candidacy in 2020.
“With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden said. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime."
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