The “Charlottesville hoax” hoax

If you’re counting, we’ve already busted two parts of the “Charlottesville Hoax” myth. Trump was not talking generally about people on both sides of the statue controversy, he was talking about a specific group—and there was no specific group other than the white nationalists present at the events Trump was referring to.

At this point, the only argument in Trump’s defense is one that I would regard as fairly plausible: Trump was, once again, blustering about a subject he didn’t understand, while insisting that he knew it better than anyone else. (You can see why this defense is not widely employed, because it doesn’t serve the purpose of making people feel more comfortable about the man in the White House.)

There’s also the fact that Trump repeatedly insisted in his Trump Tower press conference that he had painstakingly gathered the facts. “When I make a statement, I like to be correct. I want the facts.” He repeated, “unlike you and unlike the media, before I make a statement, I like to know the facts.”

But what really gives the game away is when Trump insists that the “very fine people” who were there to protest “had a permit.”