Reassessing the ‘fine people hoax’ hoax

Donald Trump appeared on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Friday morning, returning to the program where he was a weekly contributor until he announced his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Back then, he used to offer right-wing assessments of the news, unbound by any the constraints of politics or accuracy. Now that Trump is president … not much has changed.

The central news from the appearance was Trump’s casual revelation that an arrest had been made in the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. But a related interaction, prompted by one of the hosts of the show, deserves exploration as well.

“We have radicals on the right as well,” Ainsley Earhardt said to the president. “We have radicals on the left. People have got  — are watching all of these videos and cheering — some people are cheering that Charlie was killed. How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”

“Well,” Trump replied, “I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”

“The radicals on the right,” he continued, “oftentimes are radical ‘cause they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime.”

“Worried about the border,” co-host Brian Kilmeade jumped in.

“They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street,’ ” Trump continued. “The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious, and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy.” (He went on to add that the “worst thing that happened to this country” was “when we let 25 million people in” — echoing his long-standing, false claim about immigration during the Biden administration.)

First of all, Trump’s assertion about the motivations of right-wing extremists is obviously untrue. In October 2020, during Trump’s first term in office, the Department of Homeland Security released a report in which the acting director expressed that he was “particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.” That comported with Anti-Defamation League analysis showing that the vast majority of extremist killings from 2013 to 2022 were committed by right-wing actors.

A January 2024 report published by the National Institute of Justice reinforced the point.

“Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States,” it stated. “In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

None of this is to say that there is no political violence perpetrated by the left. There obviously is. Instead, it is to note that right-wing violence has been more common and not motivated by, as Trump speculated, opposition to crime. He was closer to the mark when he suggested that right-wing extremists were motivated by not “want[ing] these people coming in” — which is just another way of describing xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. (His claims about crime, of course, are not distinct from rhetoric about race, as Charlottesville attendees were aware and as recent Trumpworld rhetoric has demonstrated.)

Trump has always had a soft spot for violent actors who side with him politically. The most obvious example is the riot at the Capitol, of course, an incident in which crime-fighters were beaten by Trump supporters in an effort to subvert the 2020 election. But there are other examples, too, like Trump’s glossing over the fringe beliefs of QAnon adherents while he was president because “they like me very much.”

His “Fox & Friends” framing Friday morning, though, made me think specifically about the eight-year-old debate over Trump’s comments in August 2017, after a young woman was killed in Charlottesville, Va. He faced enormous criticism at the time for first suggesting that violence and culpability existed on both sides of the protests in that city — the side aligned with white nationalists and the side opposed to the white nationalists — and later declaring that there had been “very fine people” on both sides of the debate.

Those comments came to encapsulate a sense among many Americans that Trump is indifferent to racist violence. So, he and his allies applied a familiar and successful tactic to defuse the criticism: claim that the whole thing was a hoax.

In this case, Trumpworld decided to focus specifically on the phrase “very fine people,” which they insisted was not a reference to the racists who’d organized and dominated the original event in Charlottesville. They pointed to Trump’s after-the-fact assurances that he was “not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally” as proof that he was praising only those attendees of the fringe-right rally by white nationalists who weren’t nazis and white nationalists. This was not only an exoneration of Trump, they insisted, but more evidence that the left was unmoored in its attacks on Trump.

That was back in 2017, though, when Trump was new to the gig and still allowing himself to be constrained by public expectations and some norms of behavior. That’s why his first comments, about bad actors on both sides, spurred a straight-from-the-teleprompter denunciation of the worst extremist elements.

But now it is 2025. There are no similar guardrails. Trump perceives little need to distance himself from extremists who share his ideology; instead, he excuses them. There’s no fine people on both sides, equating attendees of a extremist rally with those opposing that extremism. Instead, he pats the right-wing extremists on the head as he excoriates some vaguely defined group of extremists on the left.

This is the dichotomy that was always at play in his “fine people” comments. What’s changed is that now he isn’t concerned about revealing it.

Photo: President Donald Trump rides in his motorcade on Sept. 9, 2025. (White House photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr)