There’s been some debate over what Trump really said in the wake of Charlottesville, intensified by Biden making it such a big part of his announcement video. It’s always worth revisiting these episodes because once they enter media and progressive folklore they tend to get distorted and exaggerated (the Lester Holt interview is a prime example). It’s not true that Trump didn’t condemn neo-Nazis or white nationalists. He excluded them from his “very fine people” remark: “And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis or 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?” The problem is that the whole march was a white-nationalist operation and the people that Trump pretty clearly meant to defend — garden-variety supporters of the Robert E. Lee statue, and there are a lot of them in Virginia — weren’t present on the ground. This made Trump’s statement confused and senseless when clarity was what was needed.