The initial plan for Tuesday’s press conference called for Donald Trump, equipped with a complex set of flowcharts, to explain how his administration will cut regulatory red tape to help streamline the process of building roads. Reporters assembled in the lobby of Trump Tower were told the president would take no questions, and that two of his top aides, Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, would field requests after he had departed. Instead, Trump neglected the flowcharts, and veered sharply away from the set agenda to articulate a shocking defense of the white nationalists who descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, last week to protest the proposed removal of a Confederate statue. “There are two sides to a story,” he said, insisting that there were some “very fine people” at the rally besides the Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis brandishing swastikas. He blamed a subsequent skirmish between the “alt-right” group and anti-racist protesters, one of whom was killed in the confrontation, as the fault of leftist agitators. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that,” he continued, relishing the opportunity to lecture a horrified press. “[They] came charging in without a permit, and they were very violent.”

Trump’s aides and advisers, arrayed along the sidelines of the Trump Tower lobby, looked pained as the president publicly expressed what he has reportedly long expressed behind closed doors. Standing next to Trump, and expecting to imminently answer questions about infrastructure, Gary Cohn, who is Jewish, floundered “somewhere between appalled and furious,” sources told Axios’s Mike Allen. Later asked whether he and other officials supported the president’s views on the protest, he desperately tried to steer the narrative back to building regulations: “We share the president’s view that infrastructure is really important to America, and our infrastructure is crumbling,” he said, lamely. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who is also Jewish, stood awkwardly between the two. But, perhaps the most telling portrait of the unease passing through Trump’s inner-circle was embodied by Chief of Staff John Kelly. Recently employed to ram a strand of military discipline through the chaotic White House he stood, arms crossed, staring at the ground, his face fixedly blank.

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, both White House advisers, reportedly urged the president to take a tougher line on white supremacy, but both were out of town, on vacation in Vermont, at the time of the presser.

The White House quickly followed up with a set of talking points, circulated among congressional Republicans, underscoring some of his remarks. “The president was entirely correct,” the document read. “Both sides of the violence in Charlottesville acted inappropriately, and bear some responsibility.” The memo also blamed the press: “The media reacted with hysteria to the notion that counter-protesters showed up with clubs spoiling for a fight, a fact that reporters on the ground have repeatedly stated.” Trump himself was said to be in “good spirits,” Politico reports, having finally vented his true feelings about the situation after being pressured to read a statement saying “racism is evil” and condemning the involved hate groups by name.