Vice President Kamala Harris used the debunked “very fine people” hoax on Monday, falsely claiming that President Donald Trump had praised white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville when he actually condemned them.
The claim came from the X / Twitter account of Kamala Harris’s official presidential campaign “rapid response” team.
7 years ago today, white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, chanting racist and antisemitic bile and killing an innocent woman.
This is who Donald Trump calls “very fine people” pic.twitter.com/FfHJhWVR9B
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 12, 2024
Snopes.com officially debunked the claim in June — seven years after it happened.
But Harris also had it debunked to her face during the vice presidential debate in 2020, when she tried using it against Trump and was hit with the facts.
The fact is that Trump was praising non-violent participants on either side of a debate about a statue. He contrasted their behavior with that of the violent neo-Nazis and Antifa activists who came to Charlottesville to fight each other.
Breitbart News confronted then-candidate Joe Biden, who ran on the hoax, with the facts in 2019 — to no avail:
Biden reiterated the hoax this weekend, and said Trump had emboldened the Ku Klux Klan to emerge without hoods.
Not only is Harris lying about the “very fine people” hoax, but she has also been slow to condemn the antisemitic violence that swept the country since October 7 saying recently that she supports the “emotion” of those protests.
Update: The Trump campaign has responded:
A lie that has been so thoroughly and exhaustively debunked that repeating it insults the intelligence of the American people.
Pretty much sums up Kamala’s campaign. https://t.co/AegbGtGXRL pic.twitter.com/JcSlVdUJ7R
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 12, 2024
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.