You can understand why President Trump’s refused to take sides following the Nazi protest in Virginia. Who’s to know who were the violent ones, out of Nazis who killed someone, or the ones that weren’t Nazis, one of whom was killed by the Nazis? It’s like a particularly tricky episode of Inspector Morse.

If Trump was a detective, he’d arrive at a murder scene and shout “there’s the murderer, the motionless woman on the ground with a chalk line round her”.

Trump must watch Jaws, and as the shark’s eating someone, think “one of these two is behaving dangerously but it would be unfair to make a judgement”.

Trump said he couldn’t blame the Nazi supporters for the violence because he didn’t yet have the facts, but luckily he could reveal the group who opposed the Nazis were “violently swinging clubs.”

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This is a piece of luck, that at least some of the facts were available. On the other hand, there’s never much of a clue as to whether Nazis have got a violent side.

Because any honest study of the Second World War has to accept that while Nazis were present at the odd fracas, this was usually caused by anti-Nazis swinging clubs. Impartial observers watched the tanks roll into France, and said “look at those awful French people swinging clubs”.

And when the unlucky Nazis had only just got over the trauma of having clubs swung at them by the Dutch, the Jews swung clubs at them as they were being shown into their ghettos.

Getting facts straight is something Trump has always been especially diligent about, not once announcing there’s been a jihadist attack in Sweden until he was absolutely certain he’d genuinely imagined it. Then he refused to declare Muslims in New Jersey celebrated on 9/11, until he’d checked and re-checked it definitely took place in his head while he was staring at an angel fish in an aquarium.

Trump called the groups opposed to the Nazis the “alt-left” and it’s about time we had an appropriate name for extremists whose views are so militant that they’re opposed to Nazis.

No one minds a fair exchange of views, but being prepared to publicly oppose Nazis is something no decent society can tolerate. That’s why all reasonable people, if they see Dunkirk, at the point when the Allied forces scramble on board the ships, scream “sink the alt-left bastards”.

They sneak around everywhere, so if you hear anyone, such as your neighbour or the woman who works in Greggs say something like “I’ve never been keen on Nazis” report them immediately to the army and MI5, the treacherous alt-left terrorists.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly watches on nervously at Trump's Charlottesville press briefing

Thankfully Trump is consistent, and maintains this outlook in all areas of conflict. So after every terrorist incident, he refuses to pass judgement until he’s got all the facts, reminding us we don’t hear enough about the violence of the anti-jihadists, who deliberately antagonise legitimate supporters of Isis by wearing yellow or humming.

Trump even gave a historical context to his reasoning: the original cause of the protest in Virginia was the proposed demolition of a statue of Robert E Lee, a general in the Confederate army during the US Civil War.

Right wing groups were angered by this, and Trump shared their dismay, saying “If you remove a statue of Robert E Lee, where does this stop?”

Exactly. Once you remove the statue of a general who fought a war to maintain the right to own people from their birth and classify them as sub-human and force them to pick cotton all day and beat them to death whenever you fancy, whose statue do you take down next? Eric Morecambe? Sir Stanley Matthews? It’s a slippery slope.

These were just reasonable people who wanted to keep a pretty statue, as you can tell from the background of the organisers. For example there was Matthew Heimbach, leader of Nationalist Front, whose speech began “We must secure the existence of our people and the future for our white children.”

Donald Trump blames both sides for Charlottesville violence

I suppose someone somewhere will find something racist in that, but this goes to show how over-sensitive we’ve become.

Another organiser was Jason Kessler, who set up an organisation he described as “defending Western civilisation from immigration and standing up for white people.”

It’s hard to see what could be provocative about that, as it’s simply the sort of mission statement you’d get from a badminton club or a Zumba class.

So the search for facts will have to go on, as there are so few clues as to which side set out to be violent. Luckily, Trump might be able to ask an expert such as David Duke, former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, who declared himself a fan of the President, saying “We have an alien people who have taken over our countries, our media, our banking. Only Donald Trump has spoken up against Wall Street and the Jewish banks.”

Trump, asked to reject Duke’s support, said: “I’ll have to do more research.”

So once again the attention to detail is impressive. Trump isn’t going to jump into any hurried conclusions, as it’s complicated to work out whether there’s a hint of antisemitism in Duke’s remarks. Maybe if Trump hires one of these de-coding people, they might decipher a hidden message in there somewhere, perhaps every fourth letter says something rude about cheesecake, but it’s so hard to tell.