Trump Insists He Blasted Charlottesville Racists And Anti-Semites In Fiery Arizona Speech
Image by Getty Images
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Donald Trump said the media misrepresented his condemnation of white supremacists last week, but he did not address the elements of his remarks blaming all sides for violence that had spurred controversy.
Trump, who unprecedentedly launched his campaign for reelection in 2020 almost as soon as he was elected, appeared Tuesday at a campaign rally in Phoenix.
He started by condemning racism and the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the weekend before last when an alleged white supremacist rammed his car into a group of counterprotesters. White supremacists were in Charlottesville to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Trump quickly transitioned however into an attack on the media — he pointed to the media pen and called reporters “dishonest” and “bad” people — and he pulled out of his pocket transcripts of his remarks at various stages after the deadly attack.
“I hit them with neo-Nazi, I hit them with everything,” he said. “I got the white supremacists, the neo-Nazi, I got them all. Let’s see — we have KKK. We have KKK. I got them all.”
In his initial remarks within hours of the attack on Aug. 12 he blamed “many sides” for the violence. And he later said there were “very fine people” on both sides.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
