by Jim Acosta
Yet I can still remember debating the root causes of the Civil War as a student at James Madison University, a college named after one of America’s founding fathers, who was also a slave owner. I can remember some of my classmates arguing that the War Between the States was the result of “Northern aggression,” while I took the view that the conflict was due in large part to the South’s unwillingness to give up its dependence on slave labor.
Later, as a young reporter, I witnessed events that demonstrated pretty clearly that America had not sufficiently dealt with the issue of race. I once covered a neo-Nazi march while working at Chicago’s CBS station, WBBM-TV. The neo-Nazis were nothing more than a bunch of racist thugs looking for a fight and brawling with the police. At the time, I thought, these guys hardly warranted the coverage. It was a dying ideology, in my view, destined to fade away with time.
But during the Obama administration, it was clear that the ghosts of the twentieth century hadn’t fully been laid to rest. The election of the first African American president gave rise to the Tea Party, the fiscally conservative political movement within the Republican Party. Its members claimed to be devoted solely to the elimination of the national debt and opposed to bailouts handed out during the 2008 financial crisis. How did that work out? Well, as soon as they controlled the White House and Congress, the Republican Party went right back to deficit spending, handing out lavish tax cuts to the rich, just as they had done during the George W. Bush administration. What I witnessed time and again covering Tea Party rallies and marches was an outburst of racist imagery on signs and T-shirts; one sign at a Tea Party march depicted Obama and Pelosi in bed with each other.
One of the ringleaders in the long opposition to Obama’s presidency, of course, was a New York businessman and TV star named Donald J. Trump, who had led the struggle to cast doubt on Obama’s American citizenship, known as the birther movement. Trump, who pushed the envelope on the issue of race in the late 1980s when he called for the death penalty for five minority teenagers in the Central Park Five case (they were convicted and later exonerated), eventually soared to political stardom as he demanded to see Obama’s birth certificate, once claiming he had sent private investigators to Hawaii to find out if the forty-fourth president was born in Honolulu. Trump’s investigation never produced any proof that Obama was from Kenya, Indonesia, or wherever. It was all a sham. One of the key under-reported stories of the 2016 campaign was Trump’s refusal to talk about his past birtherism. A former Trump campaign official told me that Trump knew the birther story was bogus but didn’t want to admit it, something he finally did in September 2016.
But Trump remained a beloved figure among the fringe, race-baiting segment of the far right. So, it was no surprise when neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other members of the alt-right gathered in Washington less than two weeks after Trump’s election to declare that their movement of hatred had been reborn.
“Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory,” exclaimed movement leader Richard Spencer, one of the organizers of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville. Was Trump responsible for this disgusting spectacle? No, not directly, but whether he liked it or not, his rise to power had emboldened these dark forces, according to experts who study extremist groups. Trump’s birther chickens had come home to roost.
Trump, who was on vacation in New Jersey during the unrest in Charlottesville, delivered a brief statement on the violence. The same president who had won the White House by employing racially loaded rhetoric, from spreading the “birther” lie about Barack Obama to slandering Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” was all of a sudden thrust into the position of calming a nation terrified by racist thugs on the march in Virginia.
There is really no other way to put it except to say that in the moments that followed, Trump failed to ease the public’s concerns. In his first remarks on the violence in Charlottesville, he appeared to blame both the white supremacists and the counterprotesters equally.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides,” Trump said. “It has been going on for a long time in our country—not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. It has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America.”
His “many sides” comment was not an accidental slip of the tongue. If you go back and watch the video, Trump pauses dramatically and repeats the words “many sides.” He wanted to make it clear that, as far as he was concerned, there was blame to go all around, never mind the fact that there were neo-Nazis and Klan members on one of those sides.
It was jarring to hear this kind of equivocation. Had Trump made this statement as a private citizen, I’m not sure many people would have cared. But it was surreal and disturbing coming from the mouth of the leader of the free world. No modern president from the post–World War II era had ever made such a statement. Trump wasn’t bringing calm to the situation, I thought. More than he had during the campaign, he was revealing who he was. There was no base to placate or excite in the hours after Charlottesville. This was a moment for leadership, not more pandering.
Here we had the president of the United States failing to adequately condemn neo-Nazis and Klansmen who had felt comfortable enough to march across an American city, Thomas Jefferson’s hometown no less, and create a violent spectacle so heinous that, by the time it was over, a young woman was dead in the street. It was the most disturbing moment of Trump’s presidency to date, and yet, to anyone who had followed his campaign or attended his rallies, it should have come as no surprise. While no one could have predicted the specific horrors of Charlottesville, the seeds of this spectacle were there during the campaign, and in the months since his election, there was ample evidence that these newly resilient pockets of American bigotry had only grown more empowered.
Trump’s initial response to the Charlottesville tragedy immediately resurrected other memories from his poor record on race during the 2016 campaign. There was the time when he equivocated over whether he should reject the endorsement of former KKK grand wizard David Duke, before finally telling reporters, “I disavow.” Then there was the controversy over his comments about the Mexican American judge who was handling the investigation into Trump University, the then-candidate’s failed for-profit real estate business program that had fleeced students. And who could forget Trump tweeting out an image of Hillary Clinton surrounded by a pile of money, next to which appeared to be the Star of David? Trump’s social media director, Dan Scavino, said at the time that it was a “sheriff’s star,” not an attempt to use anti-Semitic imagery.
Of course, there were also cringe-worthy moments from Trump’s supporters themselves. At one rally in Kissimmee, Florida, my colleagues and I watched as two men hung a Confederate flag with “Trump 2016” printed on it. It took Trump’s security about thirty minutes to convince the two men to take it down. After the rally ended, an irate Trump supporter walked up to my colleagues and gave them the middle finger, screaming, “I am a patriot! And your name is ‘traitor.’” Confederate flags kept on appearing over and over at Trump rallies. There was raw hatred pouring out of these events, day in and day out on the Trump campaign trail.
Sensing the gravity of the moment, leaders from both parties immediately blasted Trump’s response. To counter the bipartisan condemnation, the White House released a statement, via an anonymous official too cowardly to put his or her name to it, that shamelessly parroted Trump’s disgusting reaction to Charlottesville.
“The President was condemning hatred, bigotry and violence from all sources and all sides. There was violence between protesters and counter-protesters today,” the official said.
Offered a chance to do cleanup, the White House instead doubled down on Trump’s comments. There was no going back. Trump had crossed a line and, in my view, permanently damaged his presidency. And he wasn’t done.
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, ON AUGUST 14, TRUMP TRIED AGAIN. STUNG BY the
intense criticism he had received in response to his remarks immediately following the violence in Charlottesville, he addressed the nation. I was in the pool that day, as it was CNN’s day to represent the TV networks. The press gathered in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, where we awaited the president’s latest comments. The story, of course, was whether Trump would strongly condemn the white supremacists behind the melee in Charlottesville, as he should have done from the very beginning. Reading from prepared remarks, he did just that:
“Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” he said to the nation.
Later in the day, Trump held a separate event where he called for an investigation into Chinese trade practices. Still in the pool for that afternoon, I asked him about the contrast between his remarks from earlier in the day and his initial response to what had happened in Charlottesville over the weekend.
“Can you explain why you did not condemn those hate groups by name over the weekend,” I asked.
“They’ve been condemned. They have been condemned,” he replied.
I then followed up and asked why he wasn’t holding a press conference on Monday, as he had promised that previous Friday, before the events in Charlottesville.
“We just had a press conference,” he answered.
“Could we ask you some more questions?” I inquired.
“It doesn’t bother me at all, but I like real news, not fake news,” he said, and then pointed at me. “You’re fake news.”
“Mr. President, haven’t you spread a lot of fake news yourself, sir?” I responded.
Ah, the old “fake news” line. It was back. I’ve learned that’s become one of his “tells.” Like a poker player, Trump has a tell, giving away what kind of hand he’s holding. If he’s screaming about “fake news,” he’s almost always losing. And he was losing on Charlottesville. Trump clearly didn’t like the fact that he had been compelled by his advisers to revise his botched response to Charlottesville. That was as bad, in his view, as admitting a mistake. And in Trumpworld, as I’ve been told time and again by his advisers, you don’t admit mistakes. You double down on everything, even the stuff you did wrong.
Which brings us to his third crack at commenting on the events in Charlottesville, this time at Trump Tower in Manhattan. Trump had traveled to his office tower and residence in the city to meet with some of the top officials in his administration about the need to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, and a new member of the team, Chief of Staff John Kelly (who had just replaced Reince Priebus), were all in attendance.
After what had occurred the day before, I traveled up to New York with the hunch that Trump would not be able to help himself and would dive back into the Charlottesville issue. As we had so often during the campaign, we gathered in the gold-plated lobby of Trump Tower to await Trump. It felt like old times. (It should be noted that his aides told us in advance that he wouldn’t take any questions.) Trump came down the elevator, made some remarks about his hopes for an infrastructure bill, and before he could turn to exit the lobby, a question on Charlottesville was shouted his way by my NBC colleague Hallie Jackson, and we were off to the races.
It is still stunning to read the president’s remarks from that day. As of this writing, remarkably, they remain on the official White House website. In them, Trump returned to blaming both sides for the violence in Charlottesville. And that’s when I jumped in, mainly because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
TRUMP: Yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. If you look at both sides—I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And if you reported it accurately, you would say.
ACOSTA: The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest—
TRUMP: Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves—and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group.
ACOSTA: No sir, there are no fine people in the Nazis.
As you may have noticed, I didn’t put my questions in question form. That wasn’t necessary in this case, and here’s why. I suppose I could have asked him, “Sir, isn’t it true that there aren’t any fine people in the Nazis?” But that would have suggested that this notion was open to debate. I’m sorry, but there aren’t two sides when it comes to Nazis. I think we have reached the point where we can state, definitively, that Nazis are bad people. It kind of goes without saying. But I will: If you are a Nazi, you aren’t a fine person. You’re bad. So, yes, I felt well within the safe bounds of reporting to state back to the president “there are no fine people in the Nazis.” When it’s a matter of right versus wrong, there are not two sides to the story.
There’s another point to be made here, one going back to the idea that a different kind of president requires a different kind of press. If a president is trying to bully his way through some tough questions, interrupting and shouting, “Excuse me excuse me,” what do you, as a reporter, do? This is when it’s probably time to throw out the old rulebook. Trump was likely not going to candidly volunteer a comment that there are “very fine people” on both sides had I not challenged him. Sometimes the sparring he craves can be his own undoing; that’s when he often shows who he really is. And at that bizarre news conference at Trump Tower, that’s exactly what he did.
In responding to Trump’s attacks, my thinking is you have to be measured and choose the right moment. Opinions vary as to whether I have met that standard, but there are very clear moments when challenging the president’s thinking is the right choice. Who am I to judge when his thought process goes off the deep end? I think that’s fairly obvious. Whether it’s an attack on the press or a blatant lie about policy or a betrayal of American principles (e.g., that Nazis are the scum of the earth), a more restrained reaction from a reporter sets a precedent that what has been said is now acceptable in our democracy. The same goes for the president’s unrelenting assault on journalists in America. Yes, Trump’s attacks on the press are designed, for the moment, to elicit a response. And yes, that response excites parts of his base. And yes, the Trump people sit back and say, “See? It works.” And yes, some news editors say, “See, that’s why we shouldn’t respond.” But Trump’s apologists and propagandists are going to go on the attack and make our lives miserable no matter what we report. That’s what they do. If we tailor our coverage to appease them, we’ve already lost. Their reaction shouldn’t change the essential calculus that attacks on the press, if left unanswered, are just going to get worse. So, the question becomes: do you take the bait or take the knife?
More often than not, I opt for the bait, which bothers some people—both in the media and in the White House. But to those critics, I ask: does every president lie and attack the press as Trump does? No. As new presidents come along and return a state of normalcy to dealings with the news media, will there be as great a need to stand up for ourselves? Of course not. Playbooks for individual journalists and news organizations will be adjusted accordingly, as we will no longer be under attack.
After our exchange about “very fine people” that day in Trump Tower, Trump then tried to change the subject back to the grievance that drew the Unite the Right protesters to Charlottesville in the first place, the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee. When it came to sides, guess which one Trump chose? The president said in all seriousness that somehow George Washington would be next, as if federal workers would dismantle the Washington Monument.
TRUMP: Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very
, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
ACOSTA: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.
TRUMP: George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down—Excuse me, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?
A few moments after that “very fine people” comment, Trump tried to clean up his mess by adding a bit of a disclaimer. “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally,” he said. “But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”
The president’s defenders like to point to this final comment as an exoneration of his performance on Charlottesville. I call bullshit. In my view, a president of the United States should get this right the first time. It shouldn’t take four or five (or whatever number we are on) tries to get it right. Within a matter of four days, Trump had equivocated on the violence in Charlottesville, reversed himself to condemn the fascists, only to pull another about-face on the issue, basically landing where he had started, essentially siding with the white nationalists who had touched off the violence. The epic fail at Trump Tower was written all over John Kelly’s face as the chief of staff hung his head in full view of the cameras.
As I told anchor Don Lemon that night on CNN Tonight, “I think the president showed his true colors today. And I’m not sure they were red, white and blue.” This time, Trump’s revolting behavior had finally rocked his own party, destabilizing his presidency. A senior GOP congressional aide told me that night that Trump’s ability to govern was “diminishing.” Still, the president was able to weather the storm as he often does, weakened and damaged, but still standing.