SATIRE (unless it isn't)
THE HOAX FILES · 22
Even Snopes Gave Up on This One
Even Snopes waved the white flag. Snopes!
CNN and others
Seven years of "he called neo-Nazis very fine people." Then the fact-checkers read the transcript.
As printed on the graphic:
Very Fine People Hoax
What they sold
August 15, 2017, Trump Tower press conference after Charlottesville. The line that ran for years: Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists "very fine people." It anchored Biden's 2019 campaign launch and turned up in coverage on CNN and everywhere else for years.
What the record shows
The transcript. Trump said there were "very fine people on both sides" of the fight over removing a Confederate statue. In the same remarks, he said he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be "condemned totally" (PolitiFact transcript). You can argue the "both sides" framing was terrible. Plenty of people did. But the specific claim, that he called neo-Nazis very fine people, contradicts his own sentence.
June 2024: Snopes, not a right-wing outlet, rated the claim False: "No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists 'Very Fine People.'" The Washington Post ran its own analysis of what he said versus what he meant.
The damage
FNN analysis: it took seven years and a presidential campaign built partly on this claim before mainstream fact-checkers said it plainly. Gallup trust over those years: 41% in 2017, 31% in 2024. One misquote, repeated for seven years, did a lot of that damage.
Closer
The transcript was public the whole time. Seven years. Same sentence. Read it.
Sources
CNN receipt link coming