From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Dean.

Today, the president holds an extraordinary news conference to address for a third time the violence in Charlottesville.

Asked if he equates white supremacists with counter protesters on the left, the president says I am not putting anybody on a moral plan.

It's Wednesday, August 16th.

Hello everybody.

Great to be back in New York with all of our friends.

Mark Lander, can you describe the scene for us on Tuesday afternoon?

Well, President Trump was back on his home turf. He was in the lobby of his tower, Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan.

It's a familiar scene for many of us who covered the transition. This time it was different because there was a podium with the presidential seal and flags and he was surrounded by cabinet secretaries.

On what we're going to be discussing today, which is infrastructure. And he had come to basically talk about a meeting on infrastructure, which is one of his legislative priorities.

The questions, of course, were mostly about what happened last weekend in Charlottesville and the president rather than avoiding the topic plunged right into it and the press conference quickly took on life of its own.

But unlike you and unlike the media, before I make a statement, I like to know the facts.

The reporters began asking him to clarify remarks he had made about the violence in Charlottesville last weekend.

Two questions. Was this terrorism and can you tell us how you're feeling about it?

One of the first questions came from a colleague of ours, Maggie Heyberman, who asked him if what happened in Charlottesville was terrorism.

The driver of the car is a disgrace to himself, his family in this country. And that is, you can call it terrorism.

You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want. I would just call it as the fastest one to come up with a good verdict. That's what I'd call it.

Because there is a question, is it murder, is it terrorism, and then you get into legal semantics. The driver of the car is a murderer. And what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.

So Mark, the president's attorney general has called this quite clearly an act of terrorism, the driving of this car into the crowd.

The president is not willing to use that word categorically. And of course, the interesting point to make here is that President Trump has been fiercely critical of other politicians and particularly President Obama, who refused to use the phrase radical Islamic terrorism.

And yet in this case, when it involves a domestic and racially inspired case of violence, its president Trump, who shrinks from using the phrase terrorism, even if, as you point out, his own attorney general is open to calling it that.

But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. He sort of blurred the distinction where most people would say that the alt-right, the neo-Nazis, the white nationalist, brought an agenda of hate into this situation.

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