Trump ‘specifically’ condemned Nazis and White supremacists, Snopes notes
The left-leaning fact-checking website Snopes acknowledged Saturday that former President Trump never called neo-Nazis “very fine people” during his press conference following the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.
Critics of Trump have claimed for years that he equated neo-Nazis with counterprotesters following the event. President Biden was chief among those critics, citing the supposed incident as a main reason for launching his 2020 campaign.
“While Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and White supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’ Therefore, we have rated this claim ‘False,'” Snopes wrote.
The Snopes fact check now aligns with years of arguments from Trump’s camp, who long stated, backed by transcript and video, that his comments were taken out of context. The fact-checker notes that the false claim about Trump’s comments “spread like wildfire” on the left, eventually being cited as a cornerstone of Biden’s election campaign.