CNN’s Elle Reeve Calls BS On Trump ‘Very Fine People’ Hoax Claim After Biden DNC Speech Ripping Trump

CNN correspondent Elle Reeve called BS on renewed claims that former President Donald Trump’s “very fine people” remarks regarding a White Supremacist protest are actually a “hoax.”

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) kicked off in Chicago Monday night with a headlining speech by President Joe Biden during which the president tore into Trump over his remarks about Charlottesville:

I ran for president in 2020 because one of what I saw in Charlottesville in August of 2017. Extremists coming out of the woods, carrying torches, their veins bulging from their necks, carrying Nazi swastikas, and chanting the same exact antisemitic bile that was heard in Germany in the early ’30s.

Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan, so emboldened by a president then in the White House that they saw as an ally. They didn’t even bother to wear their hoods. Hate goes on to march in America. Old ghosts in new garments stirring up the oldest divisions, stoking the oldest fears, giving oxygen to the oldest forces that they long sought to tear apart America.

In the process, a young woman was killed. When I contacted her mother to ask about what happened, she told me, when the president was asked what he thought had happened, Donald Trump said, and I quote, “There were very fine people on both sides.” My God.

(BOOING)

JOE BIDEN: That’s what he said. That is what he said and what he meant. That’s when I realized, I’d listen to the admonition of my dead son, I could not stay on the sidelines. So I ran.

The speech reignited claims from Trump allies that the whole “very fine people” narrative is a “hoax” or has been “debunked.”

CNN’s Reeve  — who specializes in deep dives on the nooks and crannies of politics — immediately called BS on the chatter in an X/Twitter post.

“The ‘hoax’ claim is based on the idea Trump was right that there were some normal non-white nationalist people involved in Unite the Right. There weren’t. It was conceived of by white nationalists at a white nationalist event 3 months earlier,” Reeve wrote above a screenshot of Elon Musk making the claim:

The ‘hoax’ claim is based on the idea Trump was right that there were some normal non-white nationalist people involved in Unite the Right. There weren’t. It was conceived of by white nationalists at a white nationalist event 3 months earlier. pic.twitter.com/KbkyPJsigP

— Elle Reeve (@elspethreeve) August 20, 2024

In fact, the somewhat convoluted Snopes post that Musk cited contains a notation similar to Reeve’s:

In a news conference after the rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate statue, Trump did say there were “very fine people on both sides,” referring to the protesters and the counterprotesters. He said in the same statement he wasn’t talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be “condemned totally.”

…

Editors’ Note: Some readers have raised the objection that this fact check appears to assume Trump was correct in stating that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville incident. That is not the case. This fact check aimed to confirm what Trump actually said, not whether what he said was true or false. For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump’s characterization was wrong.

Watch above via the Democratic National Convention.