Let Us Be Real Clear (Again!) About The Problem With Trump's 'Very Fine People' Statement
People who march with Nazis to save Confederate statues are also horrible people!
For the last week or so, Donald Trump and his acolytes have been huffing and puffing about the fact that he was fact-checked during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on his unbelievably egregious claims, such as Haitian migrants eating people’s pets and post-birth abortions being legal, while Harris was not fact-checked on things like when, precisely, she stopped worrying and learned to love fracking and her description of Trump’s “very fine people” comment.
Here he is complaining about it just the other day (video courtesy of Aaron Rupar):
“I think [David Muir] corrected me 11 times of the 11 times. I don't think he had the right to correct me once,” Trump whined during a recent “news conference” he held at his golf course in Los Angeles. “He didn't correct her once, like on Project 2025. I have no idea, it had nothing to do with me, he didn't correct her. He knew that. Charlottesville — nothing was done wrong. All you had to do was read my statement one more sentence, and you would have seen that.”
IT WAS FOUR ACTUALLY, THE OTHER FOUR TIMES WERE JUST MEAN QUESTIONS.
What he’s referring to is the part later in the “very fine people on both sides” interview in which he said, “And you had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”
You’ll see this brought up all of the time as a “See! The Left does misinformation too! Trump wasn’t talking about Nazis! He said the neo-Nazis should be condemned totally! He was talking about the other people who were there to protest taking down the Robert E. Lee statue! He said that Nazis were bad and antifascists wearing black were also bad, but that there were, other than those groups, good people on both sides!!!!!”
Except, you know: There weren’t.
Allow me to be 1000 percent clear on this: People who are not Nazis but who march with Nazis in hopes of preserving Confederate statues are not “very fine people.” They are bad people. People who march without Nazis in hopes of preserving Confederate statues are not “very fine people.” They are bigots who didn’t want to give up their statues of people who fought to secede from the Union because they didn’t want to give up owning other people (or because other people didn’t want to give up owning other people).
No reasonable person can buy the argument that it is “heritage not hate.” The Confederacy only lasted for four goddamned years, only half as long as the original run of Full House. And while Uncle Jesse saying “Have Mercy!” in an Elvis voice every time he kissed Aunt Varsity Blues Scandal, Dave Coulier saying “Cut it out!” every place but the theater, and Mary Kate or Ashley Olsen saying “You got it dude!” while chugging an enormous Starbucks latte are all cherished parts of our shared television heritage … no one is going to march side-by-side with Nazis should it ever get pulled from streaming.
Not only are there no “very fine people” who want to protest side-by-side with Nazis to celebrate their heritage, there are no “halfway decent” people who want that. There are no “reasonably tolerable” people who want that. Or who would not question whether or not they really wanted to celebrate a heritage that Nazis were also very keen on celebrating. Especially those who want it so very much that they have no problem marching with Nazis at a rally organized by Nazis, explicitly to (need I remind you) “Unite the Right.” Like, that was the actual title of the rally.
Even if they were somehow unaware of the title of the rally or the fact that it was being organized by Nazis … they went there, saw Nazis carrying tiki torches and screaming “Jews will not replace us!” and thought “You know, I’m gonna stick around here for a while! This is a very important cause for me!” — and I’m going to say that’s a little sus. I went to what I thought was supposed to be an Occupy-related protest here in Chicago once, only to be immediately roped into a conversation with a man who wanted to talk to me about the dangers of fluoride.
You know what I did? I left. It wasn’t hard! And fluoride people, while awful (and just beyond tedious), are nowhere near as awful as Nazis. You know why? Because they’re not Nazis. (Except for when they are, there’s a lot of crossover in those communities.)
As a teenager, I went to a lot of punk and ska shows and was thus well-aware of the fact that if I ever saw any skins with white or red laces on their boots, it would be time to leave. Luckily, I never had to actually do that because the punks in our city had made it very clear years before I ever got there that neo-Nazis would not be welcome anywhere.
It’s not that fucking hard! Either you welcome Nazis and make common cause with them or you do not. And if you do the former, you’re not a “very fine person,” and anyone who calls you that is just as shitty of a person as you are.
I think part of the reason this has remained such a sore spot with people is not just because they’re desperate for a “gotcha” that they think can counter the lies upon lies that the President of Lies has thrust upon us, or all of the insane Pizzagate, QAnon, COVID-related lies the Right has embraced. I think it’s because they so desperately want the narrative to be that there were “very fine people on both sides,” that there are good, decent, reasonable people who just really, really love statues of Robert E. Lee, who shouldn’t be punished just because they happened to go to a rally that white supremacist groups organized for the explicit purpose of uniting the Right behind the glorious cause of preserving Robert E. Lee statues.
They want that to be a topic on which reasonable people can disagree — with no more significance than what sports team they like or which was the best season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (which lasted for three years longer than the Confederacy).
It’s like when they get so upset about Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment or other comments suggesting that we think they are bad people. They’re allowed to think we all eat babies and worship Moloch, sure — but we are under some kind of obligation to see them as inherently good people who just happen to disagree with us on a few things. Like whether or not we should celebrate people who fought for other people to be able to own people.
So just in case it’s not clear — we should not do that, and anyone who wants to do that is a bad person, and no one is going to start pretending otherwise. Hope that helps!
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
It's a "very fine" distinction without a difference.
What liberals get wrong about the Nazi next door.
Sure, Nazis have views that are not mainstream. But when you strip away the swastikas and tiki torches you’ll find that they put on their pants the same way you do. They make breakfast and drink coffee just like you do.
By The NY Times