During Thursday’s presidential debate, Biden accused Trump of calling neo-Nazis “very fine people,” repeating a long-debunked claim regarding Trump’s remarks following a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. 

“[Trump] said, ‘I think there are fine people on both sides,’” Biden claimed at Thursday’s debate. “What American president would ever say Nazis coming out of fields carrying torches, saying the same antisemitic bile, carrying swastikas, are fine people?”

Biden’s claim centers on Trump’s remarks following a 2017 Charlottesville rally, which involved protests and counter-protests over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a park. The protests ended violently when a self-proclaimed “white nationalist” drove his car into the crowd, killing one and injuring 19. 

With the help of corporate media, the claim that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” spread shortly after the events, despite Trump condemning them outright. 

“But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” Trump said of the Charlottesville protesters and counter-protesters in a news conference days after the events. “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Biden has previously made this claim a mainstay of his campaign, featuring it in a campaign advertisement and in his speech accepting the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

However, the claim has been fact-checked by multiple sources.  

CNN host Jake Tapper, who served as a moderator for the debate, previously debunked the claim. He clarified Trump was referring to other protesters.

“Now elsewhere, in those remarks, [Trump] did condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists,” Tapper said in a 2019 CNN clip. “So he’s not saying that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are very fine people.” 

Seven years after the corporate media ran wild with the false claim, Snopes stepped in last week to rate Biden’s comments as “false.”

“In a news conference after the rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate statue, Trump did say there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ referring to the protesters and the counterprotesters,” added Snopes writer Taija PerryCook. “He said in the same statement he wasn’t talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be ‘condemned totally.’”

Neither moderator fact-checked Biden during the debate.

Monroe Harless is a summer intern at The Federalist. She is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science.