Trump Walks Back Prepared Condemnation Of Nazis To Locate 'Very Fine People' Among Charlottesville Marchers, Resolves Long-Standing Concern That White Supremacy Was Categorically Disqualifying

NEW YORK. President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday clarified to reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, three days prior had included "very fine people on both sides," resolving a long-standing concern that Americans marching with tiki torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us" did not include any very fine people whatsoever.

The clarification arrived two days after the President had read a prepared statement explicitly condemning the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists, an act White House aides described as having required considerable internal coordination. By Tuesday, the President had walked the statement back without prompting, taking questions from a podium in his namesake skyscraper and assigning equivalent moral weight to the participants in the "Unite the Right" rally and the counter-protesters whose number had included thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, killed the previous Saturday when a rally attendee drove a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of pedestrians.

"You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides," the President told reporters, locating these previously unnoticed fine people somewhere among the rows of marchers carrying tiki torches and the front bumper of the vehicle that had been weaponized against Americans the day before. The President additionally questioned why statues of Robert E. Lee should be removed, an inquiry sources within the administration described as off-script.

The press conference reportedly caught the President's own staff off guard, several of whom had spent the preceding 72 hours assuring corporate CEOs, members of Congress, and the President's own daughter that the President had not drawn a moral equivalence between white nationalists and the Americans who had turned out to oppose them. Within weeks, two of the President's advisory councils on business and manufacturing would disband entirely.

Defenders of the President noted that the rally had included a small number of attendees interested only in Confederate statuary. Critics noted that those attendees had elected to march alongside men carrying swastika flags rather than march anywhere else.

At press time, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke had publicly thanked the President for his "honesty & courage" in correctly identifying the events of the previous weekend.