5 highlights from the Biden-Trump debate: Abortion, illegal immigration and golf

4. Biden doubled down on the debunked claim that Trump referred to white supremacists as ‘fine people’ 

In response to a question about whether people who intended to vote for Trump “will be voting against American democracy,” Biden identified “what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia,” in August 2017 as “what got me involved to run in the first place.” In addition to alleging that people were “carrying swastikas” at the “Unite the Right” rally, the president maintained that his predecessor commented that “there were fine people on both sides” following the protests. 

“What American president would ever say Nazis coming out of fields carrying torches, singing the same antisemitic bile, carrying swastikas, were fine people?” Biden asked. Trump pushed back, telling the moderators, “both of you know that story’s been totally wiped out.”

Trump pointed to “100 percent exoneration” when it comes to the claim that he referred to Nazis and white supremacists as “fine people.”

While the former president did not specifically mention where the exoneration came from, he was referring to a fact-check from Snopes published last week headlined “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People.’”

The article acknowledged that Trump said that the “Unite the Right” rally held to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue had “people that were very fine people, on both sides.” However, the transcript highlighted in the piece documented how Trump talked about how many people were at the event simply to protest the statue while stressing that he was “not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”