A recent fact-check debunked the notion that former President Trump praised neo-Nazis in 2017 calling them “very fine” people” and suggested President Biden and his team not to continue spreading the “lie,” and stop promoting the “hoax.”
Biden has made that assertion often, and even suggested it convinced him to run for the White House a second time in 2020 against Trump.
However, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital on Sunday that the fact-check by Snopes just showed Biden and other “corrupt Democrats” pushing a “fabricated lie” and “hoax.”
As President Trump has been proven right in this case, they’ve ordered Joe Biden’s campaign to stop advertising lies about debunked conspiracy theories and passing them off as truth to the media.
As Snopes pointed out in its fact check debunking that claim, Trump never called neo-Nazis “fine people” at Charlottesville press conference.
Instead, Trump said that there were “very fine people on both sides.” He also added that he was not referring to neo-Nazis and White supremacists, who should be “condemned totally.”
Back in August 2017, protests in Charlottesville erupted with White nationalists coming to the city and being met by hundreds of counter protesters. The protests took a violent turn with three people dead and dozens more wounded from an apparent high-speed vehicle plowing through pedestrians and other assaults.
Republicans and Democrats alike denounced the protests as a demonstration of bigotry, including suggestions from Trump that protests were unAmerican.
Trump is quoted as saying, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides,” Trump said in August that year. Trump added days later in a press conference that he condemned the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” and came under fire from Democrats for his remarks that there was “blame on both sides” and “very fine people, on both sides.”
Joe Biden then justified a White House run in 2020 based on what happened in Charlottesville, along with President Trump’s response.
“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 in his 2019 announcement.
Charlottesville also continues to be a frequent invocation for Biden, as he recently referred to it as a “battle for the soul of America was laid bare for all to see.”
