President Joe Biden repeated the debunked lie on Monday night at the DNC that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of an extremist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
“I ran for president in 2020 because of what I saw in Charlottesville in August of 2017,” Biden said. “Extremists coming out of the woods carrying torches, their veins bulging from their necks, carrying Nazi swastikas and chanting the same exact antisemitic bile that was heard in Germany in the early ’30s.”
“When the president was asked what he thought had happened, Donald Trump said, and I quote, ‘There are very fine people on both sides.’ My God, that’s what he said. That is what he said and what he meant,” Biden continued. “That’s when I realized … I could not stay on the sidelines. So I ran.”
Biden has made this debunked claim before when he said that Trump referred to neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the protest as “very fine people.”
WATCH:
However, that is not what the former president said at the press conference where he made the remarks on August 15, 2017, following the violence that broke out at the protest.
“And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally,” Trump said. “But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”
“Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats,” he continued. “You had a lot of bad people in the other group too.”
No comments: