WASHINGTON: Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney today sought an apology from US President Donald Trump for his controversial remarks in which he blamed "both sides" for the racist violence in Virginia.
Trump, just completing seven months in the White House, has faced flak for his response to Saturday's clashes between far-right and counter-protesters in Charlottesville in which a woman died and 19 others were injured.
A car, which police said was driven by 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr of Ohio, had slammed into people demonstrating along a crowded, narrow street near the University of Virginia. The rally was in protest at the removal of a statue of Robert E Lee, a general who fought for the pro-slavery Confederacy during the US Civil War.
"You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. I thought what happened was a horrible moment for our country, but there are two sides to every story," Trump said triggering a national storm.
The backlash over his failure unequivocally to condemn racism and white supremacy, culminated in the dissolution of two key business advisory panels and an avalanche of condemnation from across the political spectrum.
"Having created a national inflection point of consequence, POTUS (President of the United States) must apologise and repudiate the racists. Whether he intended to or not, what he communicated caused racists to rejoice, minorities to weep, and the vast heart of America to mourn.
His apologists strain to explain that he didn't mean what we heard," Romney said in a tweet.
"But what we heard is now the reality, and unless it is addressed by the president as such, with unprecedented candour and strength, there may commence an unravelling of our national fabric," Romney, 70, said.
Romney, who lost to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential polls, was one of the strong critics of Trump during the 2016 US elections.
He was also under consideration for the post of Secretary of State after Trump won the November general elections.
"Our allies around the world are stunned and our enemies celebrate; America's ability to help secure a peaceful and prosperous world is diminished. And who would want to come to the aid of a country they perceive as racist if ever the need were to arise, as it did after 9/11?" Romney said.
Observing that children across the nation are asking their parents the meaning of Trump's remarks, Romney said the potential consequences were severe in the extreme.
"Accordingly, the president must take remedial action in the extreme. He should address the American people, acknowledge that he was wrong, apologise. State forcefully and unequivocally that racists are 100% to blame for the murder and violence in Charlottesville," Romney said.
"Testify that there is no conceivable comparison or moral equivalency between the Nazis - who brutally murdered millions of Jews and who hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to defeat - and the counter-protesters who were outraged to see fools parading the Nazi flag, Nazi armband and Nazi salute," he said.
Romney said Trump must, once and for all, definitively repudiate the support of David Duke and his ilk and call for every American to banish racists and haters from any and every association.
"This is a defining moment for President Trump. But much more than that, it is a moment that will define America in the hearts of our children. They are watching, our soldiers are watching, the world is watching. Mr President, act now for the good of the country," Romney said in a strongly-worded statement.