The Transcript of Trump's Infrastructure / Charlottesville Press Conference
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Aside from some fairly ordinary Trumpian bullshitting early on, there are really only two things in there that should be controversial. First, he's wrong about the tiki-torch march at UVa, which was despicable. Second, he claims that there were people at the Saturday rally who were not white supremacists, but who were actually there to protest the removal of the Lee statue. Now, as far as I can tell, this is true--my only conservative friend just made the same point to me the other day, and I've seen references to this elsewhere.I haven't chased it down, but it's an empirical goddamn question. Maybe he's wrong. It's a big-ass mistake if he is...and it would give the lie to his claims about wanting to chase down all the facts. So go track down the info.
The claims that seem to be sending people over the edge are his claims that the counter-protesters were responsible for at least some of the violence--which is undoubtedly true. Though the reporters repeatedly try to make it sound as if he was equating the counter-protesters with the Nazis and Klan, he does not do this, and, in fact, explicitly denies it.
IMO the mistake about the Friday night march is a substantial one--but he makes that error rather in passing, and I haven't heard a peep about it. If he is, in fact, right about the presence of significant numbers of non-white supremacists, then he's right about basically everything that matters here--so far as actual, factual claims go. And I don't mean: he squeaks by with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, nor anything like that: he's just straightforwardly right about what he's genuinely trying to say.
In the end, this will likely go down in the public record as something it absolutely wasn't--the President of the United States equating the counter-protesters with Nazis and the Klan. It's pretty obvious that people had their minds made up before he even opened his mouth.
Remember: this is a case in which we've got even the uber-reasonable Kevin Drum claiming that the one day between the time that people started demanding that Trump explicitly denounce the groups at the protest by name and the time he called them evil was, in and of itself, a super-secret signal of approval to those groups...
Aside from some fairly ordinary Trumpian bullshitting early on, there are really only two things in there that should be controversial. First, he's wrong about the tiki-torch march at UVa, which was despicable. Second, he claims that there were people at the Saturday rally who were not white supremacists, but who were actually there to protest the removal of the Lee statue. Now, as far as I can tell, this is true--my only conservative friend just made the same point to me the other day, and I've seen references to this elsewhere.I haven't chased it down, but it's an empirical goddamn question. Maybe he's wrong. It's a big-ass mistake if he is...and it would give the lie to his claims about wanting to chase down all the facts. So go track down the info.
The claims that seem to be sending people over the edge are his claims that the counter-protesters were responsible for at least some of the violence--which is undoubtedly true. Though the reporters repeatedly try to make it sound as if he was equating the counter-protesters with the Nazis and Klan, he does not do this, and, in fact, explicitly denies it.
IMO the mistake about the Friday night march is a substantial one--but he makes that error rather in passing, and I haven't heard a peep about it. If he is, in fact, right about the presence of significant numbers of non-white supremacists, then he's right about basically everything that matters here--so far as actual, factual claims go. And I don't mean: he squeaks by with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, nor anything like that: he's just straightforwardly right about what he's genuinely trying to say.
In the end, this will likely go down in the public record as something it absolutely wasn't--the President of the United States equating the counter-protesters with Nazis and the Klan. It's pretty obvious that people had their minds made up before he even opened his mouth.
Remember: this is a case in which we've got even the uber-reasonable Kevin Drum claiming that the one day between the time that people started demanding that Trump explicitly denounce the groups at the protest by name and the time he called them evil was, in and of itself, a super-secret signal of approval to those groups...
posted by Winston Smith at
9:39 PM
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