NEW YORK — President Trump appeared at his Manhattan skyscraper to deliver a statement on infrastructure on Tuesday and ended up in a heated debate with reporters over the protests and violence that took place in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend.
Trump said there was “blame on both sides” for the clashes, which involved white nationalists and neo-Nazis fighting against counterprotesters. He praised some of the people who showed up to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in the town as “fine people.”
Trump told Yahoo News the question of whether Confederate memorials should stay standing should be left up to local officials, and suggested that eliminating Confederate memorials would open the door to the removal of other historical monuments such as those honoring George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
“George Washington was a slave owner,” Trump pointed out.
Charlottesville’s bloody weekend began Friday evening when a group of people protesting the Lee statue’s removal held a torchlit march at the University of Virginia. The group, which included prominent white supremacists and neo-Nazis, was marching as a prelude to a planned rally on Saturday.
The rally was preempted by violence that left three people dead, including two Virginia police officers who were killed in a helicopter crash while patroling the situation. Heather Heyer, a young woman who was with a group of counterprotesters, died after she was hit by a car that authorities say was driven by a demonstrator with Nazi sympathies. The president has not yet reached out to the woman’s family to offer condolences.
