Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney says President Donald Trump must say he's sorry for insisting that "many sides" are to blame in last week's deadly white supremacy rally in Charlottesville.
"Whether he intended to or not, what he communicated caused racists to rejoice, minorities to weep, and the vast heart of America to mourn," Romney said in a Facebook post Friday morning.
The commander in chief sparked outrage when he first said "many sides" were to blame for the violence in Charlottesville which counter-protester Heather Heyer, 32, was killed.
He later flip-flopped under pressure and called out the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and white supremacist groups. Then, he flip-flopped once again, going back to his "many sides" view Tuesday.
Trump also said some of the alt-right protesters are "very nice people" and both sides of the protests had some "very fine" people. And he lamented the removal of "beautiful" Confederate statutes, which are linked to slavery, across the county.
Romney, in his post, asked Trump to "forcefully and unequivocally [state] that racists are 100 percent to blame for the murder and violence in Charlottesville.
"Testify that there is no conceivable comparison or moral equivalency between the Nazis — who brutally murdered millions of Jews and who hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to defeat — and the counter-protestors who were outraged to see fools parading the Nazi flag, Nazi armband and Nazi salute.
Romney's plea to Trump emerges as the strongest rebuke yet of the embattled president from a leading Republican.
On Wednesday, Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — issued a joint statement, stating: "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms." The statement did not mention Trump by name.
And Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, tweeted:
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