Trump Is Criticized for Not Calling Out White Supremacists
Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and the father of the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, did not dispute Mr. Trump’s comments directly,
but he called the behavior of white nationalists in Charlottesville “evil.”
Democrats have suggested that Mr. Trump is simply unwilling to alienate the segment of his white electoral base that embraces bigotry.
President Trump speaking Saturday from his golf club in Bedminster, N. J., about the violence in Charlottesville,
Va., where a state of emergency was called after white nationalists clashed with counterprotesters.
But like several other statements Mr. Trump made on Saturday, the tweet made no mention
that the violence in Charlottesville was initiated by white supremacists brandishing anti-Semitic placards, Confederate battle flags, torches and a few Trump campaign signs.
Mr. Trump, the product of a well-to-do, predominantly white Queens enclave who in 1989 paid for a full-page ad in calling for the death penalty for five black teenagers convicted
but later exonerated of raping a white woman in Central Park, flirted with racial controversy during the 2016 campaign.
