"You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides... I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — they should be condemned totally."
At a press conference three days after Charlottesville, Trump said there were 'very fine people on both sides' of the statue debate — and in the same statement explicitly said he was not referring to neo-Nazis or white nationalists. The 'condemned totally' line was dropped from virtually every subsequent citation. The story became: 'Trump called neo-Nazis very fine people.' Snopes acknowledged in 2024 this was inaccurate. Biden built his 2020 campaign launch around the misquote.
The same mechanism as the bleach misquote: a vivid, shareable, partially wrong characterization displaced the actual text. Because the story was 'did Trump defend neo-Nazis' — a question that could be argued — the question that couldn't be argued was never asked: were there federal informants embedded in the white nationalist groups at Charlottesville? Multiple far-right organizations present had documented FBI infiltration.
The misquote functioned as a lid on the infiltration question. If the press had reported the actual quote, the story would have been: what did Trump mean by 'fine people on both sides' when both sides included federal assets? Instead the story was false enough to fight about for seven years — exactly long enough to ensure the infiltration angle never got traction.