Former President Donald Trump fact checked Vice President Kamala Harris for invoking the Charlottesville riots of 2017 during the presidential debate in Philadelphia, saying the narrative has been “debunked.”
“On Charlottesville, that story has been, as you would say, debunked,” Trump said. “Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse, all these people, they covered it. If they go an extra sentence, they will see. It was debunked in almost every newspaper, but they still bring it up.”
Trump’s comment followed Harris citing the 2017 protests and riots during the debate parroting President Biden that Trump allegedly sided with protesters “spewing anti-Semitic hate.”
“Let’s remember Charlottesville, where there was a mob of people carrying tiki torches, spewing anti-Semitic hate. And what did the president, then at the time say? There were fine people on each side,” Harris said.
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“Donald Trump, the candidate, has said in this election, there will be a bloodbath if … the outcome of this election is not to his liking. Let’s turn the page on this. Let’s not go back. Let’s chart a course for the future and not go backwards to the past,” Harris said.
Earlier this year, Trump said during a rally in Ohio in March that there would be a “bloodbath” for the U.S. if he is not elected while speaking about the auto industry and autoworkers.
“Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars. They’re building massive factories.”
Trump shot back during the debate that his bloodbath remark was referring to the economy.
“It was a term that related to energy, because they have destroyed our energy business. That was where the bloodbath was,” he said, before saying the Charlottesville narrative has been debunked.
Biden has long made the claim that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
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Left-leaning, fact-checking website Snopes published a piece earlier this year debunking claims promoted by Biden and some members of the media that following the Unite the Right rally, Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people.” Biden repeatedly cited the false claim before bowing out of the race, even saying it was the impetus for his 2020 White House run against Trump.
Snopes detailed in its fact check that Trump was clear he was not calling neo-Nazis “fine people” when he made the comment at a press conference that year.
“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,'” Snopes wrote.
The protests in Charlottesville in 2017, which played out across two days in August 2017, included White nationalists descending on the city who were met by hundreds of counter-protesters.
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“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides,” Trump said in August that year. Trump added days later in a press conference that he condemned the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” and came under fire from Democrats for his remarks that there was “blame on both sides” and “very fine people, on both sides.”
