Having drawn this distinction, Trump could portray what happened in Charlottesville not as a battle over racism but instead as a clash between two equally legitimate political factions. It allowed him to declare that there is an “alt-left” equivalent to the alt-right—fringes that employ violence, and tarnish the “very fine people on both sides”—and to ignore questions about whether there was actually equivalent hatred and malice in the two groups that clashed in Charlottesville.

“You had a group on one side and the other and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and horrible. It was a horrible thing to watch,” he said. “There is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You have just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. You can say what you want. That’s the way it is.”

But one can condemn violence in all forms while still acknowledging that, even before anyone threw a punch in Charlottesville, the Unite the Right rally was led by, and composed of, in large part, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Trump claimed Tuesday that his initial statement on Charlottesville blamed “all sides” because he had not yet gathered the facts, but it doesn’t require any fact-gathering to condemn white supremacy. It does not matter that, as Trump correctly stated, the white nationalists had a permit. The point is not that the president should infringe the right of white nationalists to assemble and speak freely. It is that a system of free speech which relies on good ideas to triumph over bad ones only functions if political leaders, starting with the president, loudly and clearly denounce the content of hateful speech.

The crux of Trump’s statement Tuesday was to draw a distinction between the worst of the extremists who marched in Charlottesville, and the rest who were there. “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists,” Trump said. “They should be condemned totally. You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. The press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”

How, precisely, had the press treated them unfairly? Apparently by lumping them in with the people they chose to march with—a mob that sported swastikas, bore white-supremacist symbols, and shouted anti-Semitic slogans. Trump argues that there were some in the crowd who disagreed with the neo-Nazis but were there to defend a statue of Robert E. Lee that the city of Charlottesville wants to remove, and thus decided to march alongside them.

This is an old canard in the debate over Civil War symbols: “Heritage, not hate.” Defenders of Confederate statues and Confederate flags have long contended that these symbols represent not hatred of black people but simply reverence for ancestors and a bygone way of life. Many people honestly believe that they are upholding heritage rather than hate in their embrace of Confederate symbols. But that can’t alter what the Confederacy actually stood for, why these symbols were erected in public spaces, or what they mean to many other Americans.