Some of Donald Trump’s biggest and newest supporters in finance and Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, have spent the past few weeks trying to cover up comments the former president and current Republican presidential candidate made in connection with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
Last week, the Kamala Harris presidential campaign and President Joe Biden highlighted Trump’s comment from Aug. 15, 2017, when the former president said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the clashes that followed the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville.
For years, Trump supporters have defended his comments, claiming he was talking about a nonexistent group of non-racist protesters who were there only to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
While Trump condemned the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who participated in the rally, those who covered the event have… repeatedly pointed out that only extremists participated in the march, including members of the so-called far right, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and far-right militias. Trump’s comments about “fine people” were at best misleading and at worst tacit support for extremists, despite his later disavowal. Trump has been consistently criticized for his comments, but false claims by Trump supporters have persisted. They resurfaced earlier this year when a Snopes Fact Check Titled “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People.’” Snopes later added an editor’s note, clarifying that those covering the rally said it was “conceived, directed, and attended by white supremacists and that Trump’s characterization was therefore incorrect.”
But in recent weeks, Trump supporters in Silicon Valley and Wall Street — some of whom began officially backing the former president after his assassination attempt last month — have also attempted to rewrite history.
David Marcus, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur and CEO of Lightspark who has been a supporter of the Democratic Party for years, posted last month that he was now backing Trump’s campaign.
In a post last week on X that has been viewed 33 million times, Marcus claimed that Trump’s comment about “very fine people” had been purposely taken out of context by the media. “Realizing that this was and still is a lie was a turning point for me,” Marcus wrote on X, citing a post from Harris’s official campaign account marking the seventh anniversary since Trump made the comments.
Responding to Marcus’s post, Shaun Maguire, a partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, wrote: “Totally agree.” Hours after last month’s assassination attempt, Maguire said he would donate $300,000 to Trump’s campaign.
This wasn’t the first time Maguire has questioned what happened in Charlottesville: In June, Maguire quoted a post from the disinformation account End Wokeness, writing on X: “Remember Charlottesville when Trump called neo-Nazis very fine people? I just watched the entire clip for the first time today. It’s a must-see — he literally CONDEMNS neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”
