In a scathing statement, Mitt Romney lashed out at President Donald Trump for his response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend.
Romney said if Trump doesn’t address the division he’s created, “there may commence an unraveling of our national fabric.”
Romney was referencing the comments Trump made on Tuesday when the President blamed both sides for violence at a rally where white supremacists gathered to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee memorial in Charlottesville. A white nationalist allegedly drove his car through a crowd of people who had showed up to counter-protest, killing one woman.
Romney said it doesn’t matter what Trump’s intent was with his statement, “what he communicated caused racists to rejoice, minorities to weep and the vast heart of America to mourn.”
The former Massachusetts governor and GOP presidential nominee called out the President for not speaking immediately and forcefully in condemnation of the neo-Nazis, like military leaders did, and said America’s allies may no longer come to the aid of a country they perceive as racist.
He gave the President some strong words of advice:
“The president must take remedial action in the extreme. He should address the American people, acknowledge that he was wrong, apologize. State forcefully and unequivocally that racists are 100% to blame for the murder and violence in Charlottesville. Testify that there is no conceivable comparison or moral equivalency between the Nazis–who brutally murdered millions of Jews and who hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to defeat–and the counter-protestors who were outraged to see fools parading the Nazi flag, Nazi armband and Nazi salute. And once and for all, he must definitively repudiate the support of David Duke and his ilk and call for every American to banish racists and haters from any and every association.”
