Donald Trump had barely managed to quiet the controversy surrounding his original, tepid denunciation of white nationalist and neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, when he unexpectedly reignited the controversy in a stunning press conference Tuesday afternoon at Trump Tower. “You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and it was horrible, and it was a horrible thing to watch,” he said, suggesting that some in the pro-Confederate group were “fine people” and that the left instigated much of the violence. “I think there’s blame on both sides. I have no doubt about it.”

As he continued to undermine his initial condemnation of the torch-bearing white nationalist mob, blaming the “alt-left” for the death of an anti-racist protester, members of the far right carefully celebrated Trump’s defense of Confederate history and his attacks on journalists and anti-fascist protesters:

Jack Posobiec of Prison Planet, who had been writing about the “antifa” movement and accused it of violence, recently had one of his tweets about the “alt-left” retweeted by the president. When Trump mentioned the term during his press conference, Posobiec took a victory lap:

Although Trump condemned white supremacist groups in this press conference, former K.K.K. grand wizard David Duke seemed quite happy with the rest of Trump’s comments, as did other representatives of the white supremacy movement:

Others within the Trump orbit condemned the white supremacists, but not for the reasons one would think: