Republican and Independent voters reacted favorably when former President Donald Trump pushed back on President Biden's narrative regarding the 2017 Charlottesville riots, according to a live second-by-second reaction among voters.
"Both of you know that story has been totally wiped out, because when you see the sentence, it said 100 percent exoneration on there. So he just keeps it going," Trump said Thursday evening during his first debate against Biden, as Republican voters reacted favorably toward the comments.
"He's without question, the worst president, the worst presidency in the history of our country. We shouldn’t be having a debate about it. There’s nothing to debate," Trump said, as Independent and Republican voters notably showed support for the remark. The live reactions were based on an equal number of Independent, Republican and Democratic voters responding to the debate from a Fox studio.
Trump's comments came in response to Biden's long-standing claim that Trump called neo-Nazis "very fine people" following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. A left-wing fact checking site recently debunked Biden's claim.
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"He made up the Charlottesville story, and you’ll see it’s debunked all over the place. Every anchor has – every reasonable anchor - has debunked it," Trump continued.
"And just the other day, it came out where it was fully debunked. It’s a nonsense story. He knows that," Trump said as support spiked among Independent voters. "And he didn’t run because of Charlottesville. He used that as an excuse to run."
Live reactions to the comment showed Independent voters reacting more favorably to Trump, saying the narrative was "fully debunked" than Republican voters. Democratic voters' reaction to the statement remained steadily low.
When Biden spoke, Democratic support spiked upwards.
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"What got me involved to run in the first place, after my son had died, I decided – in Iraq – because of Iraq. I said I wasn’t going to run again, until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas or torches and singing the same antisemitic bile they sang back in Germany," Biden continued, as Democratic approval of the comments increased. The live reactions showed Republican and Independent voters received the comment poorly.
"What American president would ever say, Nazis coming out of fields, carrying torches, singing the same antisemitic bile, carrying swastikas, were fine people," Biden said.
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When Biden mentioned "swastika or torches," Independents' reaction notably plummeted.
Left-leaning, fact-checking website Snopes published a piece Saturday debunking claims promoted by Biden and some members of the media that following the Unite the Right rally, Trump called neo-Nazis "very fine people." Biden has repeatedly cited the false claim, even saying it was the impetus for his 2020 White House run against Trump.
Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt previously told Fox News Digital that the Snopes fact check shows Biden and other "corrupt Democrats" promoted a "lie" and "hoax."
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"The Charlottesville lie was another hoax perpetuated by the corrupt Democrats and their mouthpieces in the fake news media, just like the Hunter Biden laptop, the Russian collusion scandal and so many others, all in an attempt to smear President Trump. Joe Biden’s campaign must end any advertising that pushes this lie because President Trump has, once again, been proven right," she said.
Snopes detailed in its fact check that Trump was clear he was not calling neo-Nazis "fine people" when he made the comment at a press conference that year.
"While Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and White supremacists and said they should be 'condemned totally.' Therefore, we have rated this claim 'False,'" Snopes wrote.
The protests in Charlottesville in 2017, which played out across two days in August 2017, included White nationalists descending on the city who were met by hundreds of counter-protesters.
"We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides," Trump said in August that year. Trump added days later in a press conference that he condemned the "egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence" and came under fire from Democrats for his remarks that there was "blame on both sides" and "very fine people, on both sides."
Biden cast the events in Charlottesville, and his framing of Trump's response, as the incentive to run for the White House in 2020.
"With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it," Biden said in 2019 when announcing his candidacy.
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Biden has repeatedly pointed to Charlottesville as a moment of shame for the nation, including on the fourth anniversary, when the White House released a statement saying the rally was a "battle for the soul of America was laid bare for all to see."
