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How Trump has attempted to recast his response to Charlottesville
“It was not a secret who put that rally on that day.”
Link to tweet
Politics
How Trump has attempted to recast his response to Charlottesville
By Ashley Parker
May 7 at 6:00 AM
Hours after Joe Biden launched his 2020 campaign by attacking President Trump for his response to a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the president began to spin a yarn. ... The August 2017 demonstration was actually just a group of “neighborhood” folks from the local University of Virginia community who simply “wanted to protest the fact that they want to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said in an interview with conservative radio host Mark Levin in late April. ... Trump himself had merely been supporting those same purportedly peaceful protesters when he said there were “very fine people on both sides,” he continued.
In fact, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville — which left one woman dead and 19 injured — was explicitly organized by a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis as a celebration of white nationalism. The official event was presaged by a nighttime parade in which rallygoers held tiki torches aloft while chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil,” a reference to a nationalist slogan used in Nazi Germany.
“It is a misrepresentation of what was happening in Charlottesville to say it was a statue protest that went wrong,” said Nicole Hemmer, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center who lives in Charlottesville and attended the rally as an observer. “Anyone who was there that day would have walked into a park of people waving Nazi flags and people who were Klansmen. It was not a secret who put that rally on that day.”
For Trump, his recasting of Charlottesville is just the latest version of a story he has been altering and embellishing over the past 21 months in defense of one of the lowest points of his presidency, when he attracted bipartisan opprobrium for his seeming reluctance to forcefully condemn white supremacy. Even in his revisionist retelling, the president’s decision to lavish praise on Lee — a slave owner who led Confederate troops in defense of human bondage — leaves in place a level of ambiguity for those in his political base sympathetic to alt-right causes.
....
Ashley Parker is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress, among other things. Follow https://twitter.com/ashleyrparker
How Trump has attempted to recast his response to Charlottesville
By Ashley Parker
May 7 at 6:00 AM
Hours after Joe Biden launched his 2020 campaign by attacking President Trump for his response to a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the president began to spin a yarn. ... The August 2017 demonstration was actually just a group of “neighborhood” folks from the local University of Virginia community who simply “wanted to protest the fact that they want to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said in an interview with conservative radio host Mark Levin in late April. ... Trump himself had merely been supporting those same purportedly peaceful protesters when he said there were “very fine people on both sides,” he continued.
In fact, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville — which left one woman dead and 19 injured — was explicitly organized by a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis as a celebration of white nationalism. The official event was presaged by a nighttime parade in which rallygoers held tiki torches aloft while chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil,” a reference to a nationalist slogan used in Nazi Germany.
“It is a misrepresentation of what was happening in Charlottesville to say it was a statue protest that went wrong,” said Nicole Hemmer, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center who lives in Charlottesville and attended the rally as an observer. “Anyone who was there that day would have walked into a park of people waving Nazi flags and people who were Klansmen. It was not a secret who put that rally on that day.”
For Trump, his recasting of Charlottesville is just the latest version of a story he has been altering and embellishing over the past 21 months in defense of one of the lowest points of his presidency, when he attracted bipartisan opprobrium for his seeming reluctance to forcefully condemn white supremacy. Even in his revisionist retelling, the president’s decision to lavish praise on Lee — a slave owner who led Confederate troops in defense of human bondage — leaves in place a level of ambiguity for those in his political base sympathetic to alt-right causes.
....
Ashley Parker is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress, among other things. Follow https://twitter.com/ashleyrparker
