Vice President Kamala Harris recently repeated the debunked “very fine people” hoax, falsely claiming that President Donald Trump had praised white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville when he actually condemned them. This claim originated from a tweet by Harris’s official presidential campaign “rapid response” team on Twitter.
Seven years ago today, white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting racial and antisemitic slurs and killing an innocent woman. The misleading claim that Trump called these people “very fine people” was officially debunked by Snopes.com in June 2024, seven years after the event took place.
However, Vice President Kamala Harris also had this falsehood debunked directly to her face during the vice presidential debate in 2020 when she tried using it against Trump and was hit with the facts. In reality, Trump praised non-violent participants on both sides of a debate about a statue while condemning the violent neo-Nazis and Antifa activists who came to Charlottesville to fight each other.
Breitbart News confronted then-candidate Joe Biden with the facts in 2019, but he continued to promote the hoax. In October 2024, when antisemitic violence swept the country, Harris was slow to condemn it and instead said she supported “the emotion” of those protests. The Trump campaign has since responded to Harris’s latest falsehood.
A lie that has been so thoroughly and exhaustively debunked that repeating it insults the intelligence of the American people. Pretty much sums up Kamala’s campaign.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT. He is the author of “The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.