CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday took President Donald Trump to task for doubling down on his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” at the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
The host of “Anderson Cooper 360°” used footage from the deadly rally to highlight how it wasn’t really about people protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in the city, as Trump again claimed earlier in the day, and instead was a gathering of white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
“How many fine people arrived with combat boots and clubs and picked up torches and chanted Nazi slogans?” asked Cooper. “That’s the question. And anti-Semitic ones as well? How many fine people who you know would do that?”
“How many fine people would look around at the Nazis and the skinheads that they were marching with and say, ‘You know what, yeah, these are exactly the fine people I want to march with and carry this burning torch with,’” Cooper continued. “What do Nazi slogans and anti-Jewish chants have to do with the statue of Robert E. Lee?”
Trump was “trying to gaslight us, again” with his attempt to spin the narrative on the rally, he added, by “asking us to believe something contrary to what you and I and everybody can see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears.”
Check out the clip here: