Nearly a year after Donald Trump stunned Americans by equating neo-Nazi marchers with counter-protesters, former White House strategist Steve Bannon insists he was right.

'I still support what he said,' the long-gone Bannon told a Washington newspaper on Capitol Hill.

Trump told reporters in the wake of a August 2017 race riot in Charlottesville, Virginia that 'both sides' shared blame.

Outspoken former senior Trump aide is defending President Trump's controversial remarks after 2017 race riot in Charlottesville, Virginia (Bannon pictured last month in New York)

Trump told reporters that 'both sides' shared blame for the racial unrest in the wake of a 'Unite the Right' rally

The infamous demonstrations left a woman dead when a neo-Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters

The melee began alongside a 'Unite the Right' rally and ended with a white supremacist running down anti-racism protester Heather Heyer with his car.

James Alex Fields Jr. faces a first-degree murder charge.

But Bannon told The Hill that the underlying conflict, a long-running squabble over statues depicting Confederate war heroes, created a moral equivalence between the far right and self-described 'Antifa' – short for anti-fascist – agitators.

'Antifa is just as bad, if not worse, than the quote-unquote "fascists" that they try to stop,' he said.

During a storied Trump Tower press conference on August 15, 2017, the president condemned Fields but appeared to draw the same lines of equivalency.

Clashes the morning after the alt-right rally pitted white nationalists against 'Antifa' left-wingers

'The driver of the car is a murderer. And what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing,' he said then.

But moments later Trump said that 'there’s blame on both sides.'

'Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,' he said of a nighttime parade of tiki-torch-carrying rabble-rousers who chanted 'Jews will not replace us!' and 'White lives matter!'

'Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.'

'Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,' Trump said last year of a nighttime parade of rabble-rousers, the most extremist of whom chanted 'Jews will not replace us!' and 'White lives matter!'

As a shocked press corps and an international television audience sat with mouths agape, the president added that there were 'very fine people on both sides.'

Referring to anti-racist counter-protesters, Trump said there had been 'troublemakers' among them.

'And you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats,' he said. 'You had a lot of bad people in the other group.'

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who would run for a U.S. Senate seat months later, responded at the time: 'No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.'

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio added on Twitter: 'Mr. President, you can't allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of the blame. ... the #WhiteSupremacy groups will see being assigned only 50 percent of the blame as a win.'