First of all, the rally in Charlottesville was unambiguously a White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi rally. There was no chance that anyone travelling to participate could mistake it for anything else. Even if by some miracle someone who did not support this extreme right-wing confluence of groups stumbled into the rally, the Nazi flags, the racist and bigoted and ant-Semitic chants and the aggressive stance of most of the participants should have tipped this hypothetical person off. Many of the rally attendees were also heavily armed and outfitted military style.
The counter-protesters, on the other hand, were a mixed bunch. The so-called Antifa, or anti-fascists, were given a lot of prominence, and blamed for some of the violence, but they were only a small part of the opposition. There were members of clergy and their congregations, there were Black Lives Matter activists, there were people from all walks of life. In short, the counter-protesters were people who were opposed to groups of people who believed that other groups of people were not as good as them, weren't really Americans, or weren't really people. And for all the criticism of the Antifa's violent tendencies, there are people who credit the Antifa for protecting them or even saving their lives, shielding them from alt-right violence.
And of course one person was killed by a right-wing participant and 19 others injured.
Trump's first statement didn't even mention the White Supremacists, Nazis, and Alt-Right, a member of which who killed Heather Heyer. Instead, he condemned violence "on all sides...on all sides", giving moral equivalency to the purveyors of hate and those who protested that hate.
Trump's second statement was a bit more measured, and mentioned Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, and White Supremacists by name, as well as "other hate groups". Even adding the qualifier: "like I said on Saturday" to describe something which he certainly didn't say on Saturday.
Most Trump opponents were not fooled by this scripted response and were questioning why it took him several days to condemn by name these groups. A third statement came in response to questioning during a press conference where he angrily reverted to his initial statement, blaming the violence on "both sides" and claiming that one side was "not all...Neo-Nazis...[or] white supremacists by any stretch" and said that some of them were "fine people". (see the second paragraph above) Trump went on to decry those who want to take down statues of Confederate heroes, suggesting that they are erasing American history.
These two groups were not equivalent. One side was promoting hatred and bigotry and using intimidation and aggression to drive home their point, the other side was resisting that hatred and bigotry and resorted to violence to resist intimidation, aggression and violence from the rally organizers.
I'm not surprised that Trump chose to equate the two sides, to equate hatred and resistance to hatred. I'm also glad that the second statement wasn't the only one that he made. We got to hear the real Trump, the unscripted Trump, the Trump who, in his campaign encouraged and emboldened this brand of hatred and bigotry. Unsure? David Duke loved Trump's response.
This is a post-script added after I watched a few minutes of Trump's "rally" in Arizona. He spent several minutes attempting to debunk the opinion that many Americans now hold that he's an enabler of racism and hatred. It was especially enlightening that when he read the transcript of his first statement, he left out his words "on many sides, on many sides" which was interpreted, at least by me and many who think like me, as equating the bigots and promoters of hatred with those who resist bigotry and hatred. When reading his third statement, he also left out his comments about there being many "fine people" among the right-wing protesters. On a side note he made several references to a "small group" protesting his rally, while I have seen live coverage of a quite large gathering protesting him.
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