CHICAGO (NewsNation) — President Joe Biden continued his verbal attacks on former President Donald Trump during a speech that headlined the opening night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday, but one claim directed at Trump drew the ire of his supporters more than any other.

As he has repeatedly said in the past, Biden said the 2017 events in Charlottesville, Virginia, when clashes between neo-Nazis, white nationalists and counterprotesters turned violent led to his decision to run for president against Trump in 2020.

The event turned deadly as part of the “Unite the Right” rally, which was protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. A 32-year-old woman was killed, and 19 others were injured when a man drove his car into the crowds.

In 2023, a grand jury indicted multiple people on felony charges connected to the incident.

“Extremists coming out of the woods, carrying torches, their veins bulging from their necks, carrying Nazi swastikas and chanting the same exact antisemitic bile that was heard in Germany in the early ’30s. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan, so emboldened by a president then in the White House that they saw as an ally,” Biden said during his speech Monday night at Chicago’s United Center. “They didn’t even bother to wear their hoods.”

However, it was Trump’s response to the rally that sparked Biden’s DNC comments, which drew an immediate response on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

What did Donald Trump say in 2017?

Trump was eight months into his presidency when the rally turned deadly in August 2017. Two days after the woman was killed, Trump spoke in the lobby of Trump Tower and said that he believed “there is blame on both sides.”

“You had some very bad people in that group,” Trump said at the time, referring to white nationalists who were protesting the removal of the Lee statue. “But you also had people that were very fine people.”

The comments sparked immediate outrage and led Trump to defend his comments the following day. Trump said he believed he answered a reporter’s question “perfectly” and said he was speaking of those who were protesting the removal of the statue.

Instead, he said that some of the protesters were unfairly characterized as neo-Nazis.

“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis,” Trump said in 2017. “I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me.”

What did Joe Biden say at the DNC?

On Monday night, Biden called the Charlottesville rally an event that occurred when “hate was on the march in America.” Biden said that “old ghosts” wore “new garments, stirring up the oldest divisions, stoking the oldest fears.”

Biden continued by saying that he contacted the mother of the woman who was killed at the rally, saying that he asked what happened. “She told me,” Biden continued.

“When the president was asked what he thought had happened, Donald Trump said, and I quote, ‘There are very fine people on both sides.’ My God, that’s what he said. That is what he said and what he meant,” Biden said during his speech.

“That’s when I realized — had to listen to the admonition of my dead son — I could not stay on the sidelines. So, I ran.”

The response to Biden’s speech

Just minutes after Biden’s mention of the 7-year-old Trump comments, conservative talk show host Charlie Kirk, the founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, took aim at Biden on his X account.

“Sorry Joe, for the 100th time, the ‘very fine people’ story you keep repeating is a debunked lie and a hoax.”

Kirk included a screenshot of the fact-checking report completed by Snopes, which is considered one of the top fact-checking services in the country. In June, Snopes determined that the claim that Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people” was false.

The Snopes report concluded that Trump did say that there were “very fine people on both sides,” but that in the same statement, the then-president said neo-Nazis and white supremacists should be “condemned totally.”

Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who purchased then-Twitter in 2022, reposted Kirk’s tweet and wrote, “When Snopes knows it’s a hoax.” Musk’s post had been reposted 27,500 times and liked 110,000 times as of Tuesday morning.

The continued debate over Trump’s 2017 comments

In addition to Biden’s comments Monday night, the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is set to accept the Democratic nomination for president Thursday, also decried Trump’s 2017 comments in a post on X last week.

“Seven years ago today, white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, chanting racist and antisemitic bile and killing an innocent woman,” the campaign account, Kamala HQ, wrote. “This is who Donald Trump calls very fine people.”

Trump has continued to defend himself against the comments, targeting media outlets for taking his words out of context.

The comments were brought up at the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, which played a pivotal role in Biden’s decision to drop out of the race in July.

Biden reiterated that the events in Charlottesville convinced him to run for president in 2020 and said in the debate that Trump has “no sense of American democracy.”

Trump again said the claims of him referring to neo-Nazis and white supremacists as “very fine people” were not true.

“That story has been totally wiped out,” Trump said in the debate. “(Biden) says he ran because of Charlottesville. He didn’t run because of Charlottesville. He ran because it was his last chance … He made up the Charlottesville story, and you’ll see it’s debunked all over the place.”