Remarks
Why Trump Refuses to Call Out Alt-Right Violence
What’s behind the President’s mystifying refusal to criticize the racism in Charlottesville?
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It’s almost impossible to get Donald Trump to criticize one of his supporters. Last March, when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke supported his campaign, Trump initially declined to disavow him and at one point blamed “a bad earpiece” for his failure to do so. A couple weeks later, when a Trump supporter punched an African-American man at a stadium rally, Trump said the man “obviously loves the country” and suggested he might pay his legal bills.
And, of course, after Saturday’s alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one woman dead, Trump blamed “many sides” and refused to single out white supremacists and neo-Nazis, even as a growing chorus of Republican elected officials called on him to do so.