Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden should probably fact check the Washington Post before he repeats a story about President Trump that he or one of his speechwriters read.
That story is by Phillip Rucker, who described what readers are to believe was an ugly scene at a Trump rally in May. Rucker alleged that Trump agreed with a member of the audience who shouted that illegal aliens should be shot.
Trump did no such thing, but Biden repeated the tall tale, published August 4, in his speech yesterday in Burlington, Iowa.
Another False Trump Narrative
Rucker’s story about the rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, “‘How do you stop these people?’: Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric looms over El Paso massacre,” opens thusly:
President Trump has relentlessly used his bully pulpit to decry Latino migration as “an invasion of our country.” He has demonized undocumented immigrants as “thugs” and “animals.” He has defended the detention of migrant children, hundreds of whom have been held in squalor. And he has warned that without a wall to prevent people from crossing the border from Mexico, America would no longer be America.
“How do you stop these people? You can’t,” Trump lamented at a May rally in Panama City Beach, Fla. Someone in the crowd yelled back one idea: “Shoot them.” The audience of thousands cheered and Trump smiled. Shrugging off the suggestion, he quipped, “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.”
On Saturday, a 21-year-old white man entered a shopping center in El Paso, according to police, and allegedly decided to “shoot them.”
Biden retold the story in his mendacious anti-Trump speech: “At a rally in Florida when he asked the crowd, “How do we stop these people,” meaning immigration, someone yelled back, ‘shoot them,’ and he smiled.”
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But Biden, like Rucker, as Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff observed, told only half the story.
What Happened at the Rally
One can get the rest of it from video of the event, as did National Review’s Rich Lowry.
“When a Trump moment has entered legend,” he wrote yesterday, “it usually pays to look back and see what he actually said.”
I went back and watched that part of the rally (about 101:30 in this video)…. Immediately prior to that moment, Trump was talking about a migrant caravan heading north, and he said of border patrol agents, “Don’t forget, we don’t let them and we can’t let them use weapons. Other countries do. We can’t. I would never do that.”
Then, shortly afterward, the guy yells, and Trump smiles and shakes his head and says, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.” Clearly, this is not meant as an endorsement of the statement, but a good-natured way to acknowledge its outrageousness.
Charlottesville Lie
Biden’s other lie is the same one he has told before.
In Burlington, Biden said Trump “has chosen” to “unleash the deepest darkest forces in the nation,” an example being “what he said after Charlottesville, [that] there were, and I quote, ‘very fine people on both sides.” At the time, Biden recalled, “I said then that it gave license and safe harbor to white supremacists and neo-Nazis.”
That judgement itself would be questionable even if Trump hadn’t denounced such persons.
On April 26, USA Today contributor James S. Robbins corrected Biden on his omission during his campaign announcement the day before, when Biden said Trump “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”
Robbins helpfully reprised Trump’s full commentary, which occurred during a back-and-forth exchange on August 15 in New York:
You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides…. 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…. So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White nationalists, because they should be condemned totally — but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White nationalists. Okay?
So what Trump said was absolutely true. Many protesters were good people who showed up at the rally to protest removing Lee’s statute.
Biden has not, apparently, had the time to denounce former CNN host Reza Aslan’s call for the eradication of Trump supporters, or Democrat Representative Joaquin Casto’s doxxing of donors to the Trump campaign.
Photo: AP Images
