The second anniversary of the Charlottesville riots passed on Monday, but President Trump couldn’t leave bad enough alone.

On Tuesday he retweeted, with a “thank you” message, a misleading video that attempts to defend his much-maligned reactions to that racially charged tragedy.

The reality, despite the misdirection offered by Trump’s defenders, is that Trump, for whatever reason, went out of his way to recast the tragedy in ways that were fundamentally dishonest.

According to the new video and a growing meme among the pro-Trump commentariat, Trump is actually a victim of bad reporting about his comments in 2017. In those comments, Trump said he “condemned totally” the “neo-Nazis and white nationalists,” but then infamously insisted there were “very fine people on both sides” during the two days of protests and counterprotests.

He did so while clearly showing a defensiveness about one side in particular, namely the “side” that supposedly was “protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.” Those there to “innocently protest” in favor of the statue were, according to Trump, “not all” white supremacists “by any stretch,” but instead among the “many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

Again and again in the press conference, Trump insisted on the supposed existence of these peaceful protesters, and took great pains to say “there’s blame on both sides.” He also insisted that while he “saw the same pictures as you did,” he “watched those very closely — much more closely than you people watched it.” This bears repeating: He didn’t have a special Oval Office feed of the rallies and counterprotests. He saw the same coverage we all saw.

Trump’s defenders, especially in the video by Steve Cortes of the conservative Prager U, go to great lengths to insist that Trump was making a legitimate point in defense of real people that were “very fine.”

The problem is, there’s no evidence they really existed in Charlottesville that weekend, and certainly not that there were “many” of them.

Cortes (see the 1:56 mark, and following) and other conservatives have emphasized “another group” of “peaceful protesters,” and said “lest you have any doubts that there were good people in Charlottesville …, the New York Times confirmed it in a story they published the next day.”

What was the evidence? A quote from one woman, and only one, named Michelle Piercy, who said she and a conservative group had traveled from Wichita, Kansas to protest the statue’s removal.

So, who was that group? Well, Piercy herself identified it as an outfit called “American Warrior Revolution.” They were there supposedly as “neutral protesters” who traveled all that way to, get this, “talk to antifa and Black Lives Matter and let them know that the way they were protesting is the wrong way to go about it.”

If that sounds suspicious — if you doubt that a group with the martial name American Warrior Revolution is a peace-loving dampener of tensions — your doubts are justified. A little Internet research shows that they consider themselves a militia. Lest their outlook be misunderstood, they provide a helpful video as self-advertisement. Please watch it, here.

Watch it, and gasp. And then read this “official” statement by the group, effectively blaming liberal counterprotester Heather Heyer for her own death.

The kicker is that Trump insisted that the very fine people specifically were at the rally the night before Heyer was killed by a neo-Nazi. He said it twice. That is howlingly false. The night before was the rally in which white nationalists by the hundreds marched in paramilitary order, bearing weapons, holding aloft tiki torches, yelling racist and anti-Semitic epithets.

The media should defy Trump to produce one single video, just one, of “very fine people” and “innocent” protesters in that group. Even if Michelle Piercy is a very fine person, it beggars belief that she or anyone else could join that crowd, that night, for innocent purposes. And if Trump watched the same scenes we all watched, there is no way he saw any separate group of innocents. Zero.

One need not speculate on what synapses in Trump’s brain led him repeatedly to insist on the presence of many very fine people where none existed. It is an insult to our intelligence, though, and to decency, for him two years later to still insist on it, and to try to make any excuses whatsoever for the white nationalists who were the only ones who openly and deliberately organized their hateful rally.