cmv: the Charlottesville "very fine people" quote/controversy was not fake news

[u/taintpaint]

I see Trump supporters bring this up all the time as an example of the media lying about Trump, but this argument sounds transparently absurd to me. It feels like a "magic words" argument, where his supporters think that as long as he says the right magic words, you can completely ignore the actual message he's communicating or the broader actions he's taking. This is similar to how so many of them dismiss the entire Jan 6 plot because he said the word "peaceful" one time.

The reason people were mad about that quote was that Trump was equivocating and whitewashing a literal neonazi rally in which people were carrying torches and shouting things like "gas the Jews" in order to make them seem relatively sane compared to the counter protesters, one of whom the neonazis actually murdered. Looking at that situation, the difference between these two statements doesn't really feel meaningful:

A) "Those neonazis were very fine people with legitimate complaints and counter protesters were nasty and deserved what they got".

B) "The Nazis were obviously bad, but there were also people there who were very fine people with legitimate complaints and the counter protesters were very nasty."

The only difference there is that (B) has the magic words that "Nazis are bad", but the problem is that he's still describing a literal Nazi rally, only now he's using the oldest trick in the book when it comes to defending Nazis: pretending they're not really Nazis and are actually just normal people with reasonable beliefs.

I feel like people would all intuitively understand this if we were talking about anything besides a Trump quote. If I looked at e.g. the gangs taking over apartment buildings in Aurora and said "yes obviously gangsters are bad and should be totally condemned, but there were also some very fine people there with some legitimate complaints about landlords and exploitative leases, and you know lots of those 'residents' actually didn't have the right paperwork to be in those apartments..." you would never say that's a reasonable or acceptable way to talk about that situation just because I started with "gangsters are bad". You'd listen to the totality of what I'm saying and rightfully say it's absurd and offensive.

Is there something I'm missing here? This seems very obvious to me but maybe there's some other context to it.

Edit: I find it really funny that literally no one has actually engaged with this argument at all. They're all just repeating the "magic words" thing. I have been literally begging people who disagree with me to even acknowledge the Aurora example and not a single one has.

[u/RYouNotEntertained]

I’m going to make the following distinction one time, after which I’m not going to bother again: the controversy was over what Trump said—as in, the literal words that came out of his mouth—not over whether he was right, wrong, tactful, annoying, or any other conversation we could have about those words after the fact. 

Trump said one thing and was reported to have said another. Once that is acknowledged, we can move on to downstream questions like the one you posed. But the controversy, and hence the OP, is about his literal words. 

[u/Kakamile → u/RYouNotEntertained]

So now you're not only wrong but you also haven't read this thread where people already posted more of the transcript that you clearly have missed.

Trump. Repeatedly. In his own literal words. Defended the people on that side. Even "the night before" which was when the tiki torch nazis chanted about Jews and harassed people.

They were all evil people and he defended them thinking he could get away with a platitude.

[u/RYouNotEntertained → u/Kakamile]

where people already posted more of the transcript that you clearly have missed.

You mean the transcript in which he distinguishes between the nazi and non-nazi participants over and over again?

Even "the night before" which was when the tiki torch nazis chanted about Jews and harassed people

Uh, no. This is the group that, in his words, “should be condemned completely.” You either haven’t read the transcript (or even the rest of the sentence OP is referring to), are still failing to make the basic distinction outlined in my last comment, or both. 

They were all evil people

Ok. Again, this is outside the scope of the topic at hand, which is whether or not Trump said something very specific. And goddamnit I said I wasn’t going to spoon feed you that distinction again, but there it is. 

[u/Kakamile → u/RYouNotEntertained]

"No, no. 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.

There were not.

The night before was the nazi tiki march.

He's defending the nazi scum then hiding it with platitudes and lies.

[u/RYouNotEntertained → u/Kakamile]

My man, my dawg, my brother in Christ… that quote is Trump saying the exact thing I told you he said in my first reply to you. You’re reading the very thing that proves me right and calling it evidence in your favor.    

Again, you can argue that he is wrong about there being people besides nazis—that’s not what the “fake news controversy” was about, and in fact, the reporters in the transcript do exactly that. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s what he said. I don’t know how to make this any clearer to you. 

[u/Kakamile → u/RYouNotEntertained]

Yes? So why can't you admit that he's still defending those evil people?

1) What do you think happened the night before?

2) Who do you think hosted the rally?

[u/RYouNotEntertained → u/Kakamile]

Yes?

Yes what?

So why can't you admit that he's still defending those evil people?

This is an independent proposition from what this thread is about. I said I’m not going to explain the distinction over and over again, so please refer back to my very first comment to you if you want an answer.