Instead of helping President Trump unify the nation after the recent mass shootings, Democrats are once again peddling the Charlottesville hoax to further inflame America’s divisions.
For two years now, liberals have been brazenly lying about the remarks President Trump made in response to the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy, touting their fabrication as the most convincing evidence available that the president is actually the “white nationalist” they’ve always claimed. Following the twin shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio — which they blame on Donald Trump — Democrats and the mainstream media have predictably trotted out the Charlottesville canard once again.
As I explain in my new PragerU video, the president emphatically did not praise the white supremacists who showed up at the Charlottesville protests. Rather, he praised the “very fine people on both sides” of the lawful demonstrations over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, by which he was very clearly drawing a distinction between the peaceful protesters on both sides of that debate and the violent thugs, also representing both sides, who turned a demonstration of free speech into a bloodbath.
In fact, President Trump explicitly denounced the very people that liberals accuse him of praising, clarifying that “I’m not talking about the Neo-Nazis and the White Nationalists. They should be condemned totally.” Note that President Trump uttered those words immediately after referencing “very fine people.” The media insidiously limited the quote to portray Donald Trump as a monster.
Honest, accurate reporting would have made this perfectly clear from the outset. But we don’t have an honest press; we have an opposition press.
Instead of reporting what the President said in its proper context, mainstream media outlets distorted his remarks to make it appear as though he had expressed support for white supremacists. Liberal pundits and Democrat politicians then fiercely denounced Trump as a racist, further fueling the media firestorm and drowning out all efforts to correct the public record.
We’ve been experiencing the fallout from that outrageous deceit ever since, with “Charlottesville” serving as the go-to fallback every time the left has struggled to substantiate its latest claim about Donald Trump’s supposed racism.
Naturally, liberal journalists and Democrat presidential candidates returned to the Charlottesville narrative to bolster yet another round of slanderous attacks on President Trump in response to the tragic shootings this week. Seizing in particular on the anti-Hispanic sentiments expressed by the El Paso shooter, the left is hoping to convince the public that the president’s rhetoric was in some way responsible for the massacre, even though the shooter himself explicitly denied that he was motivated by Trump.
Joe Biden, who launched his presidential campaign with a video based on the Charlottesville deception, brought up the president’s Charlottesville comments again in his remarks following the recent shootings, citing them as evidence that we are in a “battle for the soul of the nation.”
In other words, Biden shamelessly sought to exploit the suffering in El Paso and Dayton for political gain, using it as an opportunity to slander the president with a half-regurgitated lie.
Unfortunately, Biden wasn’t alone. Senator Elizabeth Warren did the same thing. In a recent New York Times interview, Warren called President Trump a white supremacist, justifying that ridiculous assertion by falsely claiming that “He has talked about white supremacists as fine people.”
Democrats keep returning to the Charlottesville hoax because it’s the only piece of so-called evidence they have that President Trump is a racist — and because the compliant mainstream media allow them to get away with their blatant mischaracterization.
It’s important that we tell the truth about the President’s Charlottesville remarks, as well as his remarkable record of delivering incredible results for all Americans, including minorities everywhere.
Whenever President Trump tries to heal the country and ease tensions, as he’s been doing in the wake of the Dayton and El Paso shootings, Democrats use Charlottesville to sow discord and undermine his efforts. The country simply can’t afford to keep tolerating that destabilizing deception.
Steve Cortes is a CNN political commentator and a member of President Donald Trump’s Hispanic Advisory Council.