Conservative journalist Bill Kristol told Newsmax TV on Tuesday that President Donald Trump's disastrous news conference revealed "a president acting as a demagogue who was happy to incite passions on his side but do nothing for those who really are appalled by what happened in Charlottesville."
"That was not a performance of a president trying to unite the country after a very depressing and difficult street," Kristol, editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, told host Bill Tucker on "Newsmax Now."
"This march was organized by neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and alt-right groups," he said. "That was the reason something happened.
"Charlottesville had 18 months of Democratic debate. They had a vote in the city council about the Robert E. Lee statue.
"People can differ on it," Kristol said. "They had differed on it.
"They had resolved it, to the credit of the city of Charlottesville peacefully — and then these troublemakers sought to cause trouble by coming.
"The alt-left types, the Antifa types, obviously saw an opportunity to cause trouble themselves, but there's no moral equivalence here," Kristol told Tucker.
"The president is being disingenuous and his defenders in my opinion are being disingenuous."
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