Robert Jeffress, a Texas megachurch pastor and a top evangelical ally to President Trump, appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "Faith Nation" program this morning to defend Trump's unhinged press conference yesterday afternoon in which the president blamed "both sides" for the violence that occurred at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, recently.
Jeffress began by denouncing white supremacists and neo-Nazis before insisting that Trump was correct to spread the blame around because "if we're going to denounce some racism, we ought to denounce all racism."
After CBN's David Brody suggested that Trump's disastrous performance during the press conference was really "just more a style issue" and that his statements "didn't quite have the effect he intended," Jeffress agreed and blamed the entire thing on the media.
"There is an effort to do whatever is necessary to take this president down," he said, "and they have painted—the media has painted, the liberals have painted—a false narrative that the president is a racist and any time he tries to break out of that box, liberals aren't going to allow him to do it. And so, I think the reason President Trump was elected was he was very honest in what he said, he refused to be politically correct; I think he's right to denounce racism in all its forms. I know the president, you know the president, there is not a racist bone in his body."
