press trust of india
Washington, August 16: Amid a political storm over his position that ‘both sides’ were at fault for the violence in Charlottesville, a combative President Donald Trump said that he has “no doubt” over his comments.
The US President reverted Tuesday to his initial position that both left and right-wing extremists became violent during a weekend rally by white nationalists in Virginia.
He has blamed both sides including the “alt-left” for the deadly violence.
Trump had come under fire from both Republicans and Democrats for his muted response to the violence unleashed by white supremacists during a rally in Charlottesville in which a woman was killed and 19 were injured when a car ploughed into a crowd of counter-protesters.
“I think there’s blame on both sides. If you look at both sides — I think there’s blame on both sides. I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And if you reported it accurately, you would say,” Trump told reporters at an impromptu news conference at Trump Towers in New York.
When a reporter challenged his observation by saying that this was started first by neo-Nazis groups, Trump said that both sides are to be blamed. “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,” he said.
“You had a lot of bad people in the other group,” he said, adding that a night before, the white supremacist groups took out a peaceful rally in Charlottesville.
“There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E Lee. “I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people — neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them,” he said.
