Trump downplays deadly Charlottesville rally by comparing it to campus protests over Gaza war
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump claimed Thursday that the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was “nothing” compared to the ongoing pro-Palestinian campus protests, the latest example in which he has downplayed a racist incident that was one of the most criticized moments of his presidency .
Speaking in a Manhattan courtroom at the end of his criminal hush-money trial, Trump blamed President Joe Biden for student demonstrators who have set up encampments while calling for a ceasefire in the war Israel launched after Hamas’ attack on October 7. .
Biden recently, as he often does, publicly brought up the Charlottesville rally that led to his decision to run against Trump in 2020, where torch-wielding white supremacists marched to protest the removal of a Confederate statue Gen. Robert E. Lee, as they chanted “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!”
“We have protests everywhere. He was talking about Charlottesville,” Trump said. “Charlottesville was a small peanut. And it was nothing compared – and the hate wasn’t the kind of hate you have here.
Trump has tried to tie reported cases of anti-Semitism surrounding the campus protests to Biden. But in invoking Charlottesville, Trump again brought up his history of courting extremists and his repeated refusal to disavow groups like the Proud Boys, some of whom would continue to participate in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol 2021.
The Biden administration quickly condemned the comments.
“Minimizing the anti-Semitic and white supremacist venom on display in Charlottesville is abhorrent and divisive,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said.
Hundreds of white nationalists descended on the city on August 11 and 12, 2017. Clashes broke out between white nationalists and anti-racism protesters both days, prompting authorities to declare the Aug. 12 gathering an “unlawful assembly” and order the crowd to disperse. It was after that announcement that a man drove his car into a peaceful group of counter-protesters. One woman died; 35 others were injured.
Days after the deadly meeting, Trump told reporters that “you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people who were very fine people, on both sides.”
It was, as Biden has said, the moment he knew he would run for president again. He talks about this moment often, including at a campaign event last week.
“When those people walked out of those fields – in Charlottesville, Virginia – with Nazi banners, singing the same nonsense they sang on Hitler’s streets in Germany in the 1930s, with torches in hand, accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan, and a young woman was murdered, I decided I had to run. I had to run,” he said. “Our democracy is at stake, and it really is.”
The protests that have swept university campuses in recent days come as tensions rise in the US over the country’s role in the war between Israel and Hamas, especially as deaths in Gaza increase. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive.
The protests have pitted students against each other, with pro-Palestinian students demanding that their schools condemn the Israeli attack on Gaza and divest companies that sell weapons to Israel. Some Jewish students, meanwhile, say much of the criticism of Israel has turned to anti-Semitism and made them feel unsafe, and they point out that Hamas is still holding hostages taken during the group’s Oct. 7 invasion. And other Jewish students have participated in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
More than a hundred people were arrested during the protests. Biden has tried to use it politically, saying students have a right to free speech while condemning anti-Semitic protests.
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AP White House Correspondent Zeke Miller contributed to this report.