Charlottesville is back in the national news, thanks to disgraced ex-president Donald Trump, currently on trial for fraud involving his hush-money payments to a porn actress who was underwhelmed by him one night back in 2006.
Trump, speaking with reporters after leaving a New York City courtroom on Thursday, diminished the circumstances emanating from the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville that led to the deaths of three and injuries to 35 others as a “little peanut” relative to the ongoing campus protests over the war in Gaza.
“Charlottesville was a little peanut, and it was nothing compared, and the hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here,” Trump said in his post-court rant, later doubling down in a social-media post.
Bob Good, whose Fifth District seat in the U.S. House represents Charlottesville, hasn’t addressed the slur from Trump, not surprisingly.
To be fair, even if Good was a decent enough person to want to acknowledge the reality that, you know, hey, what happened on that weekend seven years ago isn’t comparable to what we’re seeing on college campuses with respect to the war in Gaza, there is an uncomfortable political reality on these kinds of things for Good that would make him want to keep his mouth shut on this one.
Good, you see, crossed Trump when he endorsed Ron DeSantis for the Republican presidential nomination last year, and now TrumpWorld is throwing its weight behind a challenger for Good for the Fifth District GOP nomination, John McGuire.
Back to Trump, who’s talking out of both sides of his mouth about a lot of things these days, trying to preach to his choir about the 88 federal charges related to fraud involving porn stars and the little matter of trying to overturn the 2020 election that he lost.
Against that backdrop, Trump, using his stable genius, came up with the verbal effluvia about Charlottesville being a “little peanut” sometime between his late-night social-media rants Wednesday night into Thursday and hearing David Pecker give even more detail about the porn-star fraud scheme throughout the day on Thursday.
What Trump was trying to do there, it would seem, is reference comments that Joe Biden has made about how the ugly events from the 2017 Charlottesville hate rally were what got him off the sofa and back into the political arena, and somehow use that against the guy who beat the snot out of him in the 2020 election.
What we’re seeing on a few college campuses right now from misguided activists taking the side of antisemitic terrorists who want to wipe Israel off the map isn’t something America should be proud of, but it ain’t white guys with tiki torches cornering students in front of the Rotunda chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and a sloppy basement-dweller plowing his muscle car into a crowd of counter-protestors hoping to kill as many of them as possible.
Trump trying to take the moral high ground on this is rich, particularly given that he’s a guy who, as White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates noted yesterday, “invited neo-Nazis and Holocaust-deniers over for lunch.”
“Minimizing the Antisemitic and white supremacist poison displayed in Charlottesville is repugnant and divisive,” Bates said in a statement.
It’s a lot more than that, actually.
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Chris Graham
