Again Drawing the Very Moral Equivalency for Which a Bipartisan Chorus
Trump Defends Initial Remarks on Charlottesville; Again Blames 'Both Sides'
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WASHINGTON — President Trump reverted Tuesday to blaming both sides for the mortiferous violence in Charlottesville, Va., and at one indicate questioned whether the motion to pull downwardly Confederate statues would lead to the desecration of memorials to George Washington.
Abandoning his precisely chosen and advisedly delivered condemnations of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis from a mean solar day earlier, the president furiously stuck past his initial reaction to the unrest in Charlottesville. He drew the very moral equivalency for which a bipartisan chorus, and his own advisers, had already criticized him.
"I think there is blame on both sides," the president said in a combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan. "Y'all had a grouping on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was too very tearing. Nobody wants to say that. I'll say it right now."
Mr. Trump defended those gathered in a Charlottesville park to protest the removal of a statue of Robert Due east. Lee. "I've condemned neo-Nazis. I've condemned many unlike groups," he said. "Non all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Non all of those people were white supremacists past any stretch."
He criticized "alt-left" groups that he claimed were "very, very violent" when they sought to confront the white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups that had gathered in Charlottesville.
"Many of those people were there to protest the taking downwardly of the statue of Robert Due east. Lee," Mr. Trump said. "So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is information technology Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you lot really do have to ask yourself, where does it finish?"
It was a remarkable rejection of the criticism he confronted after waiting two days before naming the right-wing groups in the bloodshed that concluded with the death of a young woman afterward a car crashed into a crowd of protesters.
Mr. Trump accused people he called the alt-left of "swinging clubs" as they "came charging at, as you lot say, at the alt-right." He said some of the right-wing members of the oversupply in the Virginia park were "bad." But he added that the other side came "charging in without a let and they were very, very violent."
Aides had urged him for days to take the high basis, persuading him on Monday to read a brief statement condemning the neo-Nazi groups from the Diplomatic Room in the White House. But over the past day, back in his private New York residence for the first time since becoming president, Mr. Trump was alone, without his married woman and young son, and consuming hours of goggle box, with many on cable news telling him he had non done enough.
On Monday night, he was tweeting his frustration, accusing the "fake media" of never being satisfied. But past Tuesday morning, the president was fuming again. At a scheduled event most the permitting process for infrastructure, Mr. Trump asked for questions — contrary to the wishes of his aides, including John F. Kelly, his new principal of staff, who stood to the side, looking grim.
Venting, his face red as he personally executed the defense of his own actions that no one else would, Mr. Trump all simply erased any expert will he had earned Monday when he named racist groups and called them "repugnant to everything nosotros agree dear."
Prototype 
His largely unprovoked presidential bluster on Tuesday instantly sparked an even more than intense critique, especially from Republicans.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan chosen white supremacy "repulsive" and said "there can be no moral ambivalence." Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican of Florida, tweeted: "Blaming 'both sides' for #Charlottesville?! No." Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said white nationalists in Charlottesville were "100% to arraign" and wagged his finger at the president for suggesting otherwise.
"The #WhiteSupremacy groups volition see being assigned only l% of blame equally a win," Mr. Rubio said on Twitter moments later Mr. Trump'south remarks. "We can not let this old evil to be resurrected."
Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a freshman Republican, wrote: "This is uncomplicated: we must condemn and marginalize white supremacist groups, non encourage and embolden them."
Even members of Mr. Trump's own armed forces appeared to take quick criminal offense to their commander'south words. Hours later on the president spoke, the Marine Corps commandant, Full general Robert B. Neller, wrote in a tweet that at that place is "no place for racial hatred or extremism in @USMC. Our core values of Award, Backbone, and Commitment frame the way Marines alive and act."
Mr. Trump delivered his remarks in the vestibule of Trump Tower, where officials had spent much of the 24-hour interval trying to erase certain telltale signatures of the make that would exist defenseless on TV — nearly significantly, a blue drapery was placed over the Ivanka Trump brandish in the anteroom.
If Mr. Trump was aware of the reaction that would ensue later his clearly improvised remarks, he appeared immune to the consequences of those words, which electrified the lobby of his signature office building. It was there in 2015 that he launched his presidential campaign with a furious assault on illegal immigrants and a declaration that Mexicans were "rapists" bringing crime into the Us.
Instead, the president seemed determined to convince any doubters that he did not misspeak in his first reaction to the events in Virginia on Saturday.
Mr. Trump said his initial statement was shaped by a lack of information about the events in Charlottesville, even though telly statements had been broadcasting images of the violence throughout the morning.
"There was no way of making a right statement that early," he said. "I had to run across the facts, unlike a lot of reporters. I didn't know David Duke was there. I wanted to encounter the facts."
Within minutes, Mr. Knuckles, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, praised Mr. Trump's comments equally a condemnation of "leftist terrorists."
"Thanks President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth well-nigh #Charlottesville," Mr. Knuckles said in a Twitter post.
Merely Mr. Trump also made information technology articulate that fifty-fifty now — with the benefit of hindsight — he does not have the overwhelming criticism that he should have reserved his condemnation for the white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.
Mr. Trump called the driver of the machine who the authorities said crashed into the oversupply, James Alex Fields Jr., twenty, "a disgrace to himself, his family and this state. Yous can phone call it terrorism. You can phone call information technology murder. You lot tin call it whatever you want."
Speaking frankly about an ongoing investigation in a way that presidents rarely practise, Mr. Trump said Mr. Fields, who is existence held without bail on charges of murder and malicious wounding in the expiry of Heather Heyer, is "a murderer."
"What he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing," Mr. Trump said.
Only he refused to explicitly say that the killing of the young adult female was a case of domestic terrorism, proverb simply that "you get into legal semantics."
The president also gave himself a pat on the back from Ms. Heyer's mother, who thanked him in a argument for "words of comfort and for denouncing those who promote violence and hatred" after Mon's remarks.
Mr. Trump said: "I thought it was terrific. Under the kind of stress that she is nether and the heartache she is under, I thought putting out that statement to me was really something I won't forget."
He also unleashed his frustration at the news media on Tuesday, saying they were being "fake" because they did non acknowledge that his initial argument nigh the Charlottesville protestation was "very nice."
Again and once more, Mr. Trump rejected any portrayal that nationalist protesters in the city were all neo-Nazis or white supremacists, and he said it was unfair to propose that they were.
He said blame for the violence in the city — which besides took the lives of 2 Virginia state troopers when their helicopter crashed — should as well be on people from "the left" who came to oppose the nationalist protesters.
The president said it should exist "upwards to a local boondocks, community" to say whether the statue of Lee should remain in identify.
Shortly after Mr. Trump was washed speaking, he wandered close to the velvet rope line that held a group of most twenty reporters and photographers, his mood noticeably brighter. A reporter asked if he planned to visit Charlottesville after the tragedy there. Mr. Trump replied by maxim he has a house there, and provided an endorsement of the Trump Winery nearby.
So he disappeared into Trump Bar, taking a shortcut to his residence next door.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-press-conference-charlottesville.html
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