Nearly seven years after Donald Trump infamously stated that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the deadly Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, internet fact-checkers at Snopes.com have published a piece declaring it “false” that Trump was referring to neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
This conclusion, however, fails to recognize the intricacies of Trump’s rhetoric, which serves as a prime example of doublespeak.
I believe Snopes should have, at minimum, given this a rating of “mixture,” which it uses when a “claim has significant elements of both truth and falsity to it such that it could not fairly be described by any other rating.” I did not receive a response when I contacted the author of the post and Snopes editorial staff via email.
Let’s look at some of Trump’s comments from August 15, 2017, when he addressed Charlottesville. Standing before reporters at Trump Tower, the president sought to clarify earlier comments he’d made. On August 12 and 14, he’d placed blame “on many sides” and condemned nonspecific “hate,” respectively. What he ended up doing on August 17 was making them worse.
It was a long and rambling press conference, covering topics from David Duke to Steve Bannon to John McCain and much else. But eventually, things got to the point. Remember, the entire purpose of this press conference was to save Trump from the backlash he was getting over his “many sides” comments from days earlier, but now he was making the same argument once again.
Reporter: Do you think that what you call the alt-left is the same as neo-Nazis?
Trump: Those people—all of those people—excuse me, I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
An irritated Trump rushed to defend rallygoers. Sure, this rally was organized by neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Sure, the rally was promoted using neo-Nazi and white nationalist iconography. But maybe good people just … ended up there?
Trump then went into a defense of people there to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue. Here is where Trump finally explained who he would eventually be referring to when he would go on to say “fine people on both sides”: the people who were there “the night before” the Unite the Right rally.
The “night before” that Trump was referring to included the infamous tiki torch march, the one with people chanting “Blood and soil!” and “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” Those were the people Trump was specifically referring to in his defense of attendees.
Trump made clear with this statement that he understood that all of the people, both the ones who went to the neo-Nazi rally because they wanted to stop the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue and the counterprotesters there to protest against the Nazis, were on one of two sides. He said, “I think there’s blame on both sides.” And finally, there’s the line at the center of this controversy:
Reporter: The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest—
Trump: Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves—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…
A reporter specifically said, “The neo-Nazis started this,” and Trump responded that there were “some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
According to Trump, there were “very fine people” in both of the two groups, which included the people who went to the rally organized by neo-Nazis and people who protested the neo-Nazis. Those were your “sides.” Trump, here, said that within the group of people at the neo-Nazi rally, where “the night before” they were marching with tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” there were “very fine people.”
It’s never been a matter of whether every single person who went to that rally self-identified as a neo-Nazi or a white nationalist, but that Trump said there were “very fine people” within each of the two groups. Unite the Right was a neo-Nazi rally. It did not matter whether every attendee called themselves neo-Nazis. If you show up to an event where there are people walking around with swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” then you’re absolutely not a “very fine” person.
Here’s why this matters today, and why Snopes’s call here helps Trumpworld. At first, most conservatives condemned Trump’s remarks. But by the following year, conservatives, including many who had originally condemned Trump’s response, had come around to the idea that it was actually a “hoax” that Trump had ever said there were “fine people on both sides” of the neo-Nazi rally. Led by the likes of Dilbert creator Scott Adams, the right-wing website The Daily Caller, and PragerU, conservative media outlets began pointing to individuals who attended the rally but didn’t personally identify as neo-Nazis or white nationalists as evidence that Trump wasn’t referring to those groups.
One of Trump’s strategies has always been to stake out every possible position on any given topic. That’s exactly what he did here. He talked himself into a knot. He used doublespeak, and Snopes fell for it.
Did Trump specifically say, “Some neo-Nazis are fine people?” No. Did he say that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a neo-Nazi rally? Yes!
Trump’s presidential campaign is now pointing to Snopes’s erroneous fact check to claim that Joe Biden and Democrats have been lying for years about something we all saw and heard with our own eyes and ears. This is shameful on Snopes’s part.
Snopes, which in fairness has often been a valuable debunker of right-wing disinformation and lies, fell for the semantic dance Trump performed, where implicit validation undercut explicit condemnation. By focusing on his technical disavowal of neo-Nazis, Snopes ignored the broader and more pernicious impact of his rhetoric. His words provided a veneer of legitimacy to those who shared a stage with hate. Trump’s tactic of occupying every possible rhetorical position allows his supporters to cherry-pick the most favorable interpretation, a classic case of doublespeak designed to muddy the waters of public discourse.
Labeling this as “false” without acknowledging the nuance of Trump’s doublespeak misrepresents the reality of his rhetoric. This is not just about parsing words; it’s about understanding the implications of those words in their entirety. Failing to recognize this allows history to be rewritten in a way that sanitizes the dangerous equivocation of those in power.
Snopes, in its eagerness to fact-check, missed the forest for the trees. In doing so, the site inadvertently aided in the revisionist effort to downplay the true nature of Trump’s remarks. We must remain vigilant against such simplifications, ensuring that the full context and impact of public statements are considered to safeguard the truth from being obscured by clever manipulation.
This is adapted from Molloy’s Substack, The Present Age.
