Behar clashes with Dan Crenshaw on Trump’s Charlottesville comments
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) on Monday defended President Trump’s comments following a violent 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va., prompting a heated response from “The View” co-host Joy Behar.
The back-and-forth on the ABC opinion program came after a host asked Crenshaw about his staunch criticism of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who has been accused by many Republican and some Democratic lawmakers of using anti-Semitic tropes when criticizing U.S. support for Israel.
{mosads}Crenshaw, an Afghanistan War veteran who lost his right eye in combat and was recently elected to Congress in Texas’s 2nd District, was first asked by co-host Meghan McCain why more Democrats weren’t condemning Omar’s remarks.
“Unfortunately, we’re playing a team sport these days,” Crenshaw replied. “We just had a long discussion about how Republicans feel about Trump. I think you’re seeing the same thing play out on the Democrat side, [when it’s] somebody on their own team and they’re not sure how to handle it even though behind closed doors they might disagree.”
Behar jumped in to raise Trump’s “good people on both sides” comments following the rally in Charlottesville that left one person dead.
“On the right, what we have is the president of the United States in Charlottesville saying there are good people on both sides and people are yelling ‘Jews will not replace us.’ There are not good people on both sides,” Behar exclaimed.
Crenshaw interrupted to note that “in the same sentence” Trump had said he was “definitely not referring to white nationalists,” but to those who opposed Confederate statues being taken down.
“Why do you apologize for him? He’s ridiculous!” Behar responded.
One woman was killed during the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, which was organized to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee but turned violent when it was overtaken by neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
“Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group,” Trump said on Aug. 15, 2017. “But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.”
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