Will President Joe Biden, while looking right at Donald Trump, repeat the biggest of all the anti-Trump Big Lies? It is the lie Biden claims made him decide to run in 2020.

On Aug, 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a violent confrontation broke out over the planned removal of a Confederate monument. White nationalists, who wanted the monument to remain, staged a rally and clashed with counterprotesters. A 20-year-old man, whose high school teacher said he was “deeply into Adolf Hitler and white supremacy,” drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. He killed Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman, and wounded 15 others.

Three days later, following criticism over what many called his weak initial response to the tragedy, Trump held a press conference:

“REPORTER: Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?

"TRUMP: I am not putting anybody on a moral plane, what I’m saying is this: you had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs, and it was vicious and horrible, and it was a horrible thing to watch, but there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So, you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is. …

"REPORTER: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.

"TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group — excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. …

"Are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? OK, good. Are we going to take down his statue? He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. …”

Trump critics and members of the media immediately truncated this lengthy response into “Trump said there were very fine white nationalists.” The Atlantic, for example, wrote, “President Trump defended the white nationalists who protested in Charlottesville on Tuesday, saying they included ‘some very fine people,’ while expressing sympathy for their demonstration against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.”

In his campaign 2020 video, Biden said Trump’s Charlottesville response provoked him to run:

“(Trump) said there were ‘some very fine people on both sides.’ With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

At an August 2020 fundraiser, Biden added: “When those folks came out of the fields carrying those torches, chanting the anti-Semitic bile and their veins bulging, accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan, with such ugliness … I never thought I’d see something like that again in my life. That’s when I decided …”

Biden continues to insist, with no media pushback, Trump called white nationalists “very fine people.”

But this week, seven years after Charlottesville, the left-wing fact-checker Snopes wrote: “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.’”

Now then, does Biden dare repeat this Big Lie?

COPYRIGHT 2024 LAURENCE A. ELDER