That’s my question. I had assumed it was well documented and then I recently read somewhere the claim that it had been refuted.
Let me make it clear that I am interested only in the factual question, not any political discussion. Did he or didn’t he say it?
Charlottesville, not Charlottetown. And here is a PolitiFact page on the issue.
On Aug. 15, 2017, President Donald Trump held a press conference to discuss an executive order he had signed on infrastructure permitting. Reporters shortly began asking questions about Trump’s initial response to violent protests in Charlottesville, Va. It was at this press conference that Trump said that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
He did. From the tape I heard he also said, the bad people should be condemned totally. Must go google.
That was from Politico, Full Text
Are you asking this question because you think someone is disputing that Trump said that there were very fine people on both sides?
My understanding is that no one is arguing that he didn’t say it. The argument is about whether, when he said it, he was talking about the neo Nazis or not.
I actually read somewhere someone (forget where or who) that it was now well established that Trump never said that. That is why I opened this thread and, since it has been answered (and thanks for the correction @Dewey_Finn), the thread may as well be closed.
I remember hearing him say there were “very fine people on all sides”. “All”, not “both”. I don’t know if the difference is important.
He said it about people who were arguing over whether to remove or keep statues of Confederate figures, and not about anyone professing neo-Nazi sentiment.
Snopes who among all places I think is not a pro-Trump source. Quote at the bottom.
You might be misremembering what Trump himself said, or you might be thinking of someone who misquoted him.
When the “you called Nazis fine people” thing got brought up, he got super mad and said “you know that’s a lie, it never happened”, etc.
However, he didn’t mean that he hadn’t said the words “very fine people”; he just denied that this was referring to the Neo Nazis.
The fact is that Trump definitely said there were very fine people on both sides. His apologists have used two mis-directs: that he wasn’t talking about the neo-Nazis (despite discussing the violence and murder that they did being the subject of the press briefing) or he was talking about the Civil War (which is unlikely given previous comments. The Confederacy lost the war, and the former president has been clear his only metric for “bad” is losing; it’s why he criticized John McCain for being a former POW).
You can see/hear him say it HERE.
From the CSPAN clip -
Yes, I would never defend Trump, and he seems amazingly coherent (because it was a while ago? Or is it just me?) but basically he’s saying there were good people and bad people on both sides of the whole protest, horrible things happened, spanning the days from the intial protest about taking down the statue. So presumably - to actually give him benefit of the doubt - he’s referring to people peacefully protesting the removal of the Robert E Lee statue. No indication he is singling out neo-nazis.
“You had some very bad people in that group [counter-protesters, ANTIFA] but also people very fine. On both sides… people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of to them a very important statue…”
From what I recall of the footage at the time. Antifa wannabees as well as the tiki-torch wannabees were both there spoiling for a fight and aggravating the situation at what was otherwise a rather peaceful protest on both sides.
He seems sooooo much more coherent than anything recently. It is shocking to compare that to modern Trump. It is easy to see his rapid cognitive decline.
This.
I went back and found video of the statement with time before and after the statement, to make context clear.
Much of what Trump says and does I find inexcusable, but this particular quote is used inaccurately. A similar quote from Obama is “You didn’t build this”.
It kind of goes both ways. Trump talks about “very fine people…on both sides” before ranting about the violence of the left.
And he would have just left it there; he did not want to call out the neo-nazis.
But then there was a follow-up question about whether “very fine people” included the neo-nazis, and he explicitly says “no”.
So this is why you may have heard much of the right claiming that this is one of the “lies” of the left…a deliberate misquoting.
As I say, I think this is actually nuanced. With any other politician, we would double-down and point out that, in the first instance, he clearly wanted to take the side of the nazis, and didn’t want to criticize them.
But Trump has said so many appalling things over the years, we can just use any of the 1,000 quotes where no further context is needed. So I personally don’t refer to “very fine people”, nor the “bloodbath” thing.
I think I’ve offered this on another thread:
Former President Trump has taken every conceivable position on every possible issue. He has affirmed and disavowed every position he’s ever held. He was both deadly serious and totally kidding.
The strategy? No matter the outcome, he can point to ‘evidence’ that he called it right from the beginning.
I tend to view Trump as far more evil than stupid. He says the thing that the deplorables are desperate to hear, but says it in a way that gives his surrogates space to walk it back, or offer an alternative – slightly less repugnant – interpretation.
And he does this All. The. Time. And he does this to close the deal … to make the sale.
It goes further. He was specifically asked to denounce alt right and white supremacists after making the “very fine people on both sides” remark and refused to do so. Here is a contemporary article from the time.
He doubled down on the idea again in a press conference.
Trump stepped to the podium at his New Jersey golf resort and read a statement on the clashes, pinning the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. … It has been going on for a long time in our country – not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama,” he said. “It has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America.”
That article quotes Republicans frustrated with Trump’s continued refusal to call out the white supremacists involved in the troubles. Trump clearly did not want to lose their support.
When Trump finally said that his “fine people” remark didn’t include Nazis, it had to practically be dragged out of him after a period of refusing to do it. So you can forgive anyone who suggests that Trump included the Nazi protesters in his remarks. For a long time he seemed to be doing so, and even Republicans were calling him out on it.
I’d even go so far as to say that he obviously did include them until he changed his mind and finally decided it wasn’t worth it to keep doing so. I’m sure some advisors eventually convinced him that he’d alienate more people by not denouncing the Nazis that supported him. They might have even convinced him that he’d have their support no matter what so it was low-risk. (Just my speculation here on that.)
I don’t think that’s really true. In the original clip, he is asked to denounce the Nazis, and he says “well, they weren’t all Nazis, there were some bad people, but also very fine people, on both sides”.
The Snopes article linked above goes into very good detail.
Now, as Snopes correctly points out, Trump is either lying or wrong about this. He claims that it wasn’t the Neo Nazis who came to Charlottesville, that it was a pro statue protest with some normal people and some Neo Nazis. That’s not true; the rally was the United the Right rally, and pretty specifically meant as a gathering of the furthest far right people, with many of the organizers being straight up Neo Nazis. So Trump is either wrong or lying about who was part of that march (and probably lying on purpose if I had to guess).
Up to a point, I agree. But I think he is now seriously demented and out of control.
I think we’re talking past each other. Trump had refused prior to the Unite the Right Rally to condemn white supremacists when asked how he felt about their support of him, and he continued to refuse for days after the rally itself when it came up again. The “original clip” you are talking about looks to be dated a couple of days after the CNN article I posted, which was quoting Republicans frustrated with Trump’s refusal.
But yes, when Trump talked about “very fine people on both sides”, during that exchange he did clarify he was not including white supremacists. I was confused on when that particular remark was made, and I didn’t realize it coincided with the clarification that he was denouncing Nazis and white supremacists in general. So yes, it does seem clear that the particular remark often quoted was explicitly not including them.
The quote I provided in my earlier post, where he was condemning “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” was drawing moral equivalency between everyone involved in the protest, and that was days before his clarification.
I’ll also note that years later, Trump went back to being cagey and not wanting to condemn white supremacists, because it was an election year.
…And then eventually, he did.
To summarize that BBC article, Trump had initially refused to condemn white supremacists, yet again, in the infamous “stand back and stand by” remark which was endlessly quoted.
During Tuesday’s debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked whether the president would condemn white supremacists and tell them to stand down during protests.
When Mr Trump asked who it was he was being told to condemn, Mr Biden twice said “Proud Boys”, referring to the far-right, anti-immigrant, all-group with a history of violence against left-wing opponents.
The president said: “Proud Boys - stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what… somebody’s got to do something about antifa [anti-fascist activists] and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.”
But then later…
In an interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday evening President Trump said: "I’ve said it many times, let me be clear again, I condemn the KKK [Ku Klux Klan]. I condemn all white supremacists. I condemn the Proud Boys.
“I don’t know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing, but I condemn that.”
So this is a habit of his. He refuses to condemn, then eventually does after the controversy gets too great. But this flip-flop habit makes it hard to remember what he said when, which you see even confused me, and certainly confuses even journalists years later.
It’s true that he is often reluctant to condemn white supremacists, and even seems to praise them, and will eventually condemn them when pressed. And that fact alone is something that has been used to attack his character, though sometimes the details get muddled.
I don’t disagree with any of this. I agree that Trump dog whistles (or foghorns) his approval of white supremacists constantly.
But the specific question in this thread was whether he said that “there were very fine people” among the neo Nazis. And he did not - he pretty clearly (about as clear as anything that comes out of his mouth) said that the fine people were not the Nazis - although, that was a lie, it was specifically a Nazi rally so there were assuredly not “very fine non Nazi people” who were there alongside them.