WASHINGTON (AP) — Speaking in a Manhattan courtroom hallway at the day’s end of his criminal hush money trial, Trump blamed President Joe Biden for student protesters who have set up encampments...
Donald Trump on Thursday claimed the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was “nothing” compared to ongoing pro-Palestinian campus protests...
[At Charlottesville] torch-wielding white supremacists marched to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, chanting “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!”
“We’re having protests all over. He was talking about Charlottesville,” Trump said [of President Biden]. “Charlottesville was a little peanut. And it was nothing compared — and the hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here.”
Trump has tried to pin reported instances of antisemitism around the campus protests to Biden.
Hundreds of white nationalists descended on the city on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12, 2017. Clashes between white nationalists and anti-racism protesters broke out both days, prompting authorities to declare the gathering on Aug. 12 an “unlawful assembly” and to order crowds to disperse. It was after that announcement that a man rammed his car into a peaceful group of counter-protesters. One woman died; 35 others were injured.
Days after the deadly rally, Trump told reporters that “you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
“When those folks came walking out of those fields — down in Charlottesville, Virginia — carrying Nazi banners, singing the same garbage that they sang in Hitler’s streets in Germany in the ‘30s, carrying torches, accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan, and a young woman was killed, I decided that I had to run. I had to run,” [Presiden Biden] said. “Our democracy is at stake, and it really is.”
