U.S. President Joe Biden is being accused of responding to a reporter on Monday in a manner that recalls former President Donald Trump’s saying that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017.
“Do you condemn the antisemitic protesters?” Biden was asked on Monday.
“I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I have set up a program to deal with that,” Biden said, per the pool report. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
“President Biden says there are good people on both sides of Oct. 7,” wrote Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of the Federalist.
Josh Holmes, president and founding partner of Calvary and former chief-of-staff to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), made a similar observation as did National Review online editor Philip Klein.
“Biden condemns opponents of Hamas,” wrote Stephen Miller, a former senior advisor to Trump.
Biden has cited the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville repeatedly as a reason he ran for president, although he reportedly made the decision before that rally.
“Look, I wasn’t going to run in 2020, because I just lost my son Beau a little earlier and—until I watched what happened down in—in Virginia when those folks came out of the fields carrying torches and—and Nazi flags and accompanied by white supremacists,” Biden said at an event late last month, per a White House transcript. “And a young woman was killed—a bystander.”
“And when the president was a—former president was asked what he thought of that, he said, ‘There are very fine people on both sides,'” Biden said.
