UN chief says Trump not ‘sufficiently aware’ of ‘tragic’ Charlottesville implications

Guterres also tells the Israeli TV station that US President Donald Trump did not fully grasp the implications in his response to the neo-Nazis Charlottesville rallies.

“I think he was not sufficiently aware how tragic this is,” the UN secretary-general says. Trump was reaching out to voters, he added, but “this is a matter of fundamental values.”

On August 11 and 12, a throng of hundreds, many carrying guns, converged on Charlottesville, Virginia, yelling anti-Semitic and racist slurs and carrying Confederate flags and neo-Nazi and KKK signs. Several street fights broke out between the demonstrators and counter-protesters, and a woman was killed and others injured when one of the white supremacist protesters drove a car into people marching against the rally.

Trump’s first response was to say “many sides” were at fault, while pointedly declining to even mention the racist hate groups that had organized the rally. Two days later, he called out the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, who played an outsized role in the demonstration, by name.

Days later, however, Trump doubled down on his original assessment allocating equal blame to “both sides” and saying there were “very fine people” among the right-wing protesters.