Charlottesville: Fox News host calls Donald Trump's press conference 'disgusting'
A Fox News presenter has torn into Donald Trump over a "disgusting" press conference in which he blamed "both sides" for white supremacist violence in Charlottesville.
Kat Timpf described the President's latest extraordinary comments on the neo-Nazi rally that left one anti-fascist protester dead as "one of the biggest messes I have ever seen".
She was speaking on The Fox News Specialists, which she co-hosts on the typically Trump-friendly right-wing news channel.
Earlier on Tuesday the President had said there were "two sides to every story" after being questioned about Charlottesville, blaming the "alt-left" as well as far-right extremists for the disorder.
“You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now," he told reporters.
The President also defended right-wing hate groups who converged in the Virginia city to protest the removal of a Confederate statue, saying: "Not all of those people are neo-Nazis, not all of those people are white supremacists."
Ms Timpf said: "It shouldn’t be some kind of bold statement to say, 'Yes, a gathering full of white supremacist Nazis doesn’t have good people in it.' Those are all bad people, period.
"It is disgusting."
The President's press conference at Trump Tower came just a day after he yielded to 48 hours of mounting pressure and denounced the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups as "repugnant".
But in his latest remarks, Mr Trump insisted his initial Charlottesville statement - in which he condemned hatred and violence "on many sides" - had been " a fine statement".
"You don’t make statements until you know the facts. It takes a little while to get the facts," he added.
The occasionally surreal press conference - in which the the President also boasted of owning "one of largest wineries in the United States" in Charlottesville - prompted widespread disbelief and criticism.
"It was one of the biggest messes I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe it happened," said Ms Timpf
“It is honestly crazy for me to have to comment on this right now because I’m still in the phase where I am wondering if it was actually real life, what I just watched."
Mr Trump's insistence that left-wing protesters were partly to blame for the violence in Charlottesville was enthusiastically applauded by the far right, including former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
"Thank you President Trump for your honesty and courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville and condemn the leftist terrorists," he wrote on Twitter.
Mr Trump sparked anger for initially failing to reject Mr Duke during last year's Presidential election campaign.
He later disavowed the white supremacist under growing pressure.
