Republican and independent voters responded favorably to former President Donald Trump’s remarks about President Biden’s views on the 2017 Charlottesville riots, according to voter second-by-second responses.
“You both know that story has been completely wiped away, because when you look at the verdict, it says 100 percent innocent. So he continues to do that,” Trump said during his first debate with Biden on Thursday night. Republicans reacted positively to the remarks.
“He is, hands down, the worst president in the history of our country, the worst presidency. There should be no debate about that. There’s no room for debate,” Trump said, with independents and Republican voters particularly approving. The live response was from equal numbers of independents, Republicans and Democrats reacting to the debate in Fox’s studios.
Trump’s remarks were a response to Biden’s long-held claim that Trump had called neo-Nazis “very fine people” after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. A left-leaning fact-checking site recently debunked Biden’s claim.
Snopes exposes Charlottesville fake news, Biden found to have lied, Trump campaign claims
U.S. President Joe Biden (right) and Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump, participate in the CNN presidential debate at CNN Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, June 27, 2024. (Getty Images)
“He made up the Charlottesville story and it’s been debunked everywhere. Every news anchor, every decent news anchor has debunked it,” Trump continued.
“And just the other day, that was exposed as completely false. It’s bullshit, and he knows it,” Trump said, amid a surge in his support among independents. “And he didn’t run because of Charlottesville. He used it as an excuse to run.”
Left-wing fact-checker acknowledges Trump never called Charlottesville neo-Nazis ‘very fine people’ in blow to Biden
Looking at live reactions to the remarks, independent voters responded more favorably to Trump than Republicans, calling the remarks “completely false,” while Democrats’ reactions to the remarks remained consistently low.
After Biden spoke, Democratic support soared.
Biden once condemned “anti-Semitic malice” but now faces his own “Charlottesville moment”
President Biden and former President Trump debated on Thursday night. (Getty Images)
“What prompted me to run in the first place was my decision to run in Iraq after my son died. I said I wasn’t going to run again until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. People came out of the woods with swastikas and torches, singing the same anti-Semitic slurs that they sang in Germany,” Biden continued. The remarks drew strong support from Democrats. Live reactions indicated that Republican and independent voters took the remarks unfairly.
“The president of the United States has said that the Nazis who came out of the fields, carrying torches, chanting the same anti-Semitic epithets and holding up swastikas were fine people,” Biden said.
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When Biden mentioned “swastikas and torches,” independents’ reactions dropped off significantly.
The left-leaning fact-checking website Snopes published an article on Saturday refuting claims made by Biden and some media outlets that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” after the Unite the Right rally. Biden repeatedly He even said the false allegations inspired him to run for the White House in 2020 against President Trump.
The Patriot Front marches across Memorial Bridge in front of the Lincoln Memorial on December 4, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Getty Images)
Caroline Leavitt, national spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, previously told Fox News Digital that Snopes’ fact checks showed Biden and other “corrupt Democrats” had spread “lies” and “hoaxes.”
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“The Charlottesville lie, like so many others, including the Hunter Biden laptop and Russia collusion scandal, is another fabrication spread by the corrupt Democrats and their mouthpieces in the Fake News Media, all in an attempt to discredit President Trump. The Joe Biden campaign must stop all ads spreading this lie because President Trump has once again been proven right,” she said.
In a fact check, Snopes detailed that when Trump made the remarks at a press conference that year, he was clear that he was not calling neo-Nazis “fine people.”
President Joe Biden participates in the CNN presidential debate at CNN Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, June 27, 2024. President Biden and Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump, face off in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election campaign. (Andrew Harnick/Getty Images)
“Trump said that ‘there are very fine people on both sides,’ but clarified that he was not talking about neo-Nazis or white supremacists, who he said ‘should be completely condemned,’ so we’ve rated the claim ‘False,'” Snopes wrote.
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Two days of protests in Charlottesville in August 2017 saw white supremacists descend on the city and be met by hundreds of counter-protesters.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this terrible display of hatred, bigotry and violence that took place on many sides, on many fronts,” Trump said in August of that year. At a press conference a few days later, Trump added that he condemned the “horrible display of hatred, bigotry and violence,” drawing criticism from Democrats for his comments that “there is responsibility on both sides” and that there are “very fine people on both sides.”
President Trump addresses NRA members (National Rifle Association)
Biden cited the events in Charlottesville and Trump’s response to the incident as motivation for running for the White House in 2020.
“With those words, the president of the United States drew a moral equivalence between those who spread hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden said in 2019 when he announced his presidential candidacy.
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Biden has repeatedly pointed to the Charlottesville massacre as a moment of national shame, and on the four-year anniversary of the incident, the White House issued a statement saying the rally “put the battle for the soul of America on display for all to see.”
