Former President Donald Trump is once again trying to excuse his comments in defense of some neo-Nazi demonstrators in the 2017 Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally — and in an editorial for MSNBC, Jarvis DeBerry is having none of it.
Trump was emboldened by a recent article in the fact-checking outlet Snopes that, in DeBerry's view, splits hairs to claim he technically didn't defend the neo-Nazis — and Trump doubled down on this at the recent CNN debate.
He claimed that President Joe Biden “made up the Charlottesville story, and you’ll see it’s debunked all over the place. Every anchor has — every reasonable anchor has debunked it. And just the other day it came out where it was fully debunked. It’s a nonsense story. He knows that. And he didn’t run because of Charlottesville. He used that as an excuse to run.”
This is untrue, wrote DeBerry — and "repugnant."
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"Snopes argues that because Trump later in his statement explicitly condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists, it’s wrong to say he was categorizing them as 'fine people.' One imagines Snopes summarizing Marc Antony’s 'Friends, Romans, countrymen' speech as 'Aide calls Caesar’s killers ‘honorable men,’' wrote DeBerry. "While it’s the job of the fact-checker to fuss over the smallest details, it’s the job of the truth-teller to include the larger context."
Trump's comments, he noted, came just after a counterprotester, Heather Heyer, was murdered for resisting the neo-Nazis, and Trump was already under criticism for his slow response to the tragedy.
"The context is also that Trump, as we’ve long known, defines 'very fine people' as those who like him and very bad people as those who don’t," DeBerry pointed out — and yet "Was there anybody on Heyer’s side that fateful day who didn’t detest Trump? Probably not. Was there anybody on the 'Unite the Right' side, the Robert E. Lee side, who wouldn’t support Trump? That’s just as doubtful. In fact, that rally was attended by the likes of people who’d illegally fight for him to hold on to power on Jan. 6, 2021."
Ironically, DeBerry concluded, one of Trump's own running mate shortlisters, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), condemned is statements at the time, demanding Trump give "clarity and moral authority" — and recently Scott went on Fox News to say that the two talked it over and Trump listened and learned from that.
So, argued DeBerry, "by suggesting that his Charlottesville remarks weren’t an abject failure, he’s undercutting the case of one of the candidates he’s presumed to be considering."
