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For all the shock value of the president's failure to condemn on Tuesday night's debate stage, it was just the latest in a series of episodes in which the president has entertained racist notions and demurred in condemning radical and racist groups.

Years before his unlikely presidential bid, the president began to get attention on the national political scene as far back as 2011 when he began peddling an unfounded birther conspiracy, questioning whether former President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States.

The president has still never truly disavowed his promotion of that racist conspiracy theory.

\"PHOTO:
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
PHOTO: President Donald Trump participates in the first presidential debate, Sept. 29, 2020, in Cleveland.
>

As a candidate in 2016, when white nationalists and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke endorsed the president's bid for the White House, then-candidate Trump did not immediately disavow the support.

And when he did, it was only reluctantly and in direct response to a reporter who asked him about the endorsement at a press conference.

\"David Duke endorsed me? Okay, all right. I disavow, okay?\" Trump said, offering a snippy, half-hearted repudiation.

When neo-Nazis marched with Tiki torches in Charlottesville chanting \"Jews will not replace us\" in the first year of his presidency, Trump failed to call them out in his first statement reacting to the events.

Instead, Trump famously equivocated and said he condemned the violence \"on many sides.\"

\"PHOTO:
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
PHOTO: President Donald Trump speaks about the violence, injuries and deaths at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., at Trump Tower, New York on Aug. 15, 2017.
>

Trump's reluctance to clearly condemn the racist marchers led to a torrent of criticism across the political spectrum.

Two days after his initial statement, the president bowed to pressure from his staff to read a second statement off the Teleprompter that did condemn the white supremacist.

\"Racism is evil,\" he said. \"And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.\"

After making the clear condemnation, the president regretted it almost immediately -- blaming his staff for making him do it and telling them, \"That's the last time I do that.\"

The very next day after making the carefully crafted statement, the president was back to drawing a moral equivalency between the neo-Nazi protesters and those who came out to counter-protest.

\"You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,\" Trump famously said during an impromptu press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower.

And on Tuesday, the president repeated his pattern of not outright condemning white supremacists and their views -- this time on the national debate stage.

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