Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer, after drawing a "direct line" Sunday between President Donald Trump's campaign and the racial violence in his city over the weekend, said Monday he's finished talking about the president.
"I've already spent enough time talking about Donald Trump," the mayor told CNN's "New Day" program. "He is our president, with respect. But I think it speaks for itself. He had his moment . . . he had his opportunity and he whiffed, and I think that speaks for itself."
Signer, a Democrat, said he wants to return focus on his city, which is still grieving but is getting back to work while growing and succeeding.
"This city is one of the most loving cities in the world, recently ranked America's most charming city, a city whose spirit and culture of generosity is supported by this spirit of diversity and tolerance that we have here," Signer said. "We have a major office of the International Rescue Committee, for instance, several hundred immigrants, political refugees who have settled here. We love them. They happen to mostly be Muslim."
Charlottesville also has a large, historic African-American population, the mayor pointed out.
However, when the city's residents made the decision to bring down a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, it became a target of supremacists, he said.
"They picked the wrong city," he said. "If anything, we'll come together and press the gas on all the values that have made us a success story, and I think we're seeing that."
There were 600 rallies over the weekend in support of Charlottesville against the wave of hatred, he said.
"Groups like Nazis and the KKK in our streets feeling comfortable to show their faces?" Signer said. "That came to a head this weekend. I think the nation as one rose up and just turned the page on it and it happened here in Charlottesville."
Signer said it was anticipated for months that the gathering of white nationalists coming in to protest the statue's removal, and the counter protesters coming in to speak out against them, would be large.
"Those numbers, those predictions kept on growing and growing and growing," he said. "We had on the ground here the largest deployment of law enforcement professionals in Virginia since 9/11. As I understood it, almost 1,000 officers were on the ground. We're a city of 50,000 people surrounded by a county of 120,000. So an area of a couple hundred thousand."
Signer said Charlottesville's city manager wanted to move the rally to a much larger area, where policing would be easier to maintain, but a federal judge on Friday ruled against moving the rally away from the city's Emancipation Park.
"Our job as a government is to set the conditions so people can peaceably assemble, peaceably express themselves," Signer said. "They didn't even allow that to happen for their own rally."
Meanwhile, Signer told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program Monday that the nation is "speaking with one voice" about what happened in his city, and what needs to happen next.
"I think Charlottesville is going to be synonymous with the nation in turning the page on this horrific chapter in American politics, where bigots and fringe were invited into the mainstream out from the shadows where they belonged," he said. "That just came to an end this weekend."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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