Chesco Congressman Costello To Trump: 'Call Charlottesville What It Is'

In a radio interview Thursday, Chester County's U.S. Rep. Ryan Costello (R-PA 6) urged President Trump to speak with clarity on the Charlottesville, Va. incidents this weekend, saying that he should "call Charlottesville what it is" and eschew false equivalency.

"What happened was someone drove a car into a crowd and killed one person and injured 19 others, and that was a white supremacist. That’s what happened," Costello said on WFMZ. "So he [President Trump] should call it what it is and not get into this broader question of who else out there may be causing noise and contributing to the situation that we’re in right now."

President Trump has been criticized for his response to the violence that attended a white nationalist rally and counter-protest in Charlottesville over the weekend. The rally was incited by the removal of Confederate statues from public parks, especially a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville. A man with Nazi sympathies drove into a crowd of protesters during the incident, killing one woman and injuring 19 others.

At a press conference on Tuesday about infrastructure, Trump said large groups of counter-protesters at Saturday's rally in Virginia were “very, very violent” and attacked the white nationalist and Nazi groups. In angry tones, he repeated his condemnation of white supremacists and Nazis but said that many of the people at the rally were good people protesting the removal of the statue.

A total of 35 people were injured over the weekend.

"We're a better country than what happened in Charlottesville," Costello added. "And we’re a better country than these remarks that sort of equalize or marginalize or create an equivalency between various forms of hate. Hate is bad and it’s ugly, and we should be pushing back against it on all cylinders."

Rallies and protests are set in nearby Phoenixville and Pottstown, and similar vigils have been held or are scheduled across the region, including in Abington, West Chester and Lansdale.

Image via U.S. Rep. Ryan Costello