There is surely no more hateful urban legend–and none more enduring, it would appear–than the one that claims that President Trump once described some KKK members and Neo-Nazis as “good people.”
Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke just repeated this falsehood.
But here are President Trump’s exact words, from that Charlottesville event:
“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 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.”
And his further words that same day:
“I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”
Whether Beto O’Rourke’s words were an intentional fabrication, or simply part and parcel to the accepted zeitgeist (even if it is untrue), is quite unclear to me.