Trump Rant Defending Charlottesville Protestors Shocks Social Media

Even Fox News’ Kat Timpf calls out POTUS for drawing false equivalence between white nationalists and “alt-left” counter protestors

CNN’s Jake Tapper summed up what everyone was thinking immediately after the end of Donald Trump’s combative press conference Tuesday afternoon: “Wow, that was something else.”

The president had just delivered a rambling rant about the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend — and television viewers, social media users, and even members of conservative-leaning media were left stunned and speechless.

Read the full account here, but in summary: Trump backpeddled from earlier comments by saying there is “blame on both sides” for the violence surrounding the white nationalist protest “Unite the Right”;  drew equivalence between white supremacists and counter protestors; used the Sean Hannity-coined term “alt-left,” and demanded to know why no one was talking about that group of people.

Trump also insisted that most of the people at “Unite the Right” were not white nationalists, and claimed that they were protesting peacefully on August 11, the day before a counterprotestor was murdered and several others injured when a nazi sympathizer drove his car into a crowd. Notably, “Unite the Right” was organized by a known white nationalists, promoted largely through white nationalist channels, and on August 11 hundreds of attendees were video taped chanting “Jews will not replace us” while carrying torches.

Suffice to say, the reaction is not positive. Read on for a sample.

https://twitter.com/AnneFrankCenter/status/897558428343828480

But it wasn’t all bad news for the Trump. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, still a highly visible figure in American’s white supremacist culture, expressed outright gratitude for Trump drawing equivalence between the white nationalists at Unite the Right, and liberal counterprotestors.

https://twitter.com/DrDavidDuke/status/897559892164304896

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