Rep. Will Hurd said Tuesday he was "absolutely not" proud of the way President Donald Trump doubled down on his initial comments — blaming both sides for the Charlottesville violence Saturday — saying "racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism, it is not OK."
"You can't support it in any form or fashion," Hurd, 39, the second-term Texas Republican, who is African American, told Wolf Blitzer on CNN. "If you are showing up to a Klan rally, you are probably a racist or a bigot.
"The images that I saw were skinheads and neo-Nazis beating up women and trying to poke people with flag poles.
"It is not okay," he said. "This is unacceptable."
Noting the broad attacks that came at Trump for those first statements, "I think the outrage across the political spectrum about this is maybe the thing that ultimately unites us," Hurd said.
The representative said he just finished 27 town halls in his western Texas district.
"The thing I learned this way is that more unites us than divides us," Hurd told Blitzer. "Those are the things we should be talking about and making sure we continue this experiment called America."
Hurd called the car-ramming attack that killed a woman and injured 19 others terrorism, saying "we should be trying to talk about and understand why are some of these groups getting radicalized.
"How do we prevent this from happening? Why do people feel it is OK to publicly talk about racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism?
"Our law enforcement, do they have the resources to deal with this kind of problem?
"This is where the conversation should be," he said. "Nobody should doubt whether or not the leader of the free world is against racism, bigotry, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semitism."
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