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RNC chair: No place for white supremacists in the Republican Party

By LOUIS NELSON

White supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups have “no place in the Republican party,” its chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said Wednesday morning hours after President Donald Trump insisted that those groups did not deserve 100 percent of the blame for their violent rally over the weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.

McDaniel defended Trump, who reiterated in a Wednesday press conference inside his Manhattan skyscraper that “there’s blame on both sides” for the deadly clashes last Saturday, telling ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the president had condemned the hate groups.

That condemnation, delivered Monday, came under great political pressure and was quickly undone Tuesday when the president repeated what had been his initial reaction, that the white supremacist groups and the protesters gathered to oppose them should share the blame for the violence that erupted.

“Well the president condemned the white supremacists and the KKK and the neo-Nazis unequivocally,” McDaniel told ABC anchor David Muir.

“But it took 48 hours for him to do that,” Muir replied.

“But he did it and he should have and he did. And our party has across the board has said this is unacceptable. We have no place in our party at all for KKK, anti-Semitism, race -- racism, bigotry, it has no place in the Republican party,” she said. “There is no home here. We don't want your vote. We don't support you. We'll speak out against you. The president has said so.”

The violence in Charlottesville peaked Saturday when a man drove a car into a group of anti-white supremacist protesters, killing one woman and injuring 19 other people.

Trump’s Wednesday remarks equivocating the hate groups that marched Saturday in Virginia with the demonstrators gathered to oppose them prompted quick and forceful rebukes from prominent members of his own party, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and former 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who is McDaniel’s uncle.

Former KKK leader David Duke, a former Louisiana state representative, thanked Trump, via Twitter “for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists.”

“Oh, I think that makes everybody's stomach turn and I think it makes the president's stomach turn,” McDaniel said when asked about Duke’s online comment. She said Trump “has condemned David Duke. David Duke has nothing to do with the Republican party.”

Duke supported Trump during last year’s presidential election, an endorsement that the president did not immediately reject when asked about it in an interview. Later, under political pressure, Trump said he did not want Duke’s support.

While McDaniel was insistent that the president had been unequivocal in his condemnation of the hate groups that marched on Saturday in Virginia, she diverged from Trump in assessing the blame for the deadly violence.

“When it comes to Charlottesville, the blame lays squarely at the KKK and the white supremacists who organized this rally and put together an entire event around hate and bigotry,” she said. “I don't think comparing blame works in this situation because we know what initiated the violence and the death of this young woman whose life was taken too soon.”