So, you are arguing that when he said that there were good people on both sides, he was saying that some of the people who were marching and chanting were not neo-nazis? And those were the "good people"?
Let's review the bidding. Here's where I started--parsing what Trump actually said in the Charlottesville statement.
Message 32907551
Trump said that "were very fine people, on both sides." Parsed, that means that he was asserting that there were at least two fine people on each side.
He also said "The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people — neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest, and very legally protest.” That statement excludes neo-Nazis from the "fine people" categorization, as I parse it. It seems reasonable that there could very well have been at two innocent protesters who happened to be in the protester group amongst all those "bad people." At least there's no way to prove otherwise.
The occasion was a demonstration by right-wingers. Trump said "both sides," one side being right-wingers, the other side being the opposition to the right-wingers. So, on the right-wing side you had neo-Nazi cohort and you also had people who were simply there to protest removal of the statues, protesting being their right. People who are simply nostalgic about their statues are not necessarily neo-Nazis. My take is that the statue cohort is who Trump considered to be "some fine people."
So, in answer to your question, I'm not remotely arguing that the cohort "marching and chanting [blood and soil] were not neo-Nazis." Of course they were. But not everyone present at the event on the right-wing side was carrying tiki torches and chanting that. The neo-Nazis were not the only right-wing cohort present.
Neither am I arguing that the statue-only folks are "fine people" but only that Trump would consider them so and that's who he meant by "fine people," not the neo-Nazis. That take is reinforced by his further statement in which he called the neo-Nazis "rough, bad people," whether or not that characterization was sincere. He clearly said in that particular statement that there were "fine people" and "rough, bad people" on the right-wing side.
All I'm arguing, then, is that Trump, at that time and place, did not say that the neo-Nazis were "fine people," as has been charged, and that it's incorrect, even a lie, to continue to repeat that he did. If 59% of Democrats believe that he referred to neo-Nazis as fine people in that statement, then they are either inattentive or mislead (as i-node claims) or cognitively impaired. |
