Under Fire, Trump Clarifies: He Does View neo-Nazis, KKK as ‘repugnant'

WASHINGTON -- Battered from all sides for his muted response to deadly violence Saturday at a white supremacist rally, President Trump sought Monday to tamp down the criticism by making clear that he condemns only one side: the neo-Nazis and Klansmen, rather than the protesters who gathered to oppose them. "Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name - including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans," Trump said at the White House, delivering a written statement before a live TV audience and a small group of reporters, whose questions he ignored when he'd finished.That was a much more direct condemnation than Trump offered Saturday from his golf club in New Jersey, when he seemed to suggest a moral equivalence between hate groups and counter-protesters after deadly clashes in Virginia.Sen. Ted Cruz was among the fellow Republicans whose direct condemnation of the ultra-right demonstrators, and the deadly attack by an Ohio Nazi sympathizer who rammed his car through a crowd of counter-protesters, threw into sharp relief the president's own response."The Nazis, the KKK, and white supremacists are repulsive and evil, and all of us have a moral obligation to speak out against the lies, bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred that they propagate," Cruz said in a statement issued Saturday night that was widely seen as a reproach of Trump.  Continue reading...