RENO, Nev. _ A day after stoking the nation's racial tensions at a political rally in Phoenix, President Donald Trump set aside his anger and called for healing "the wounds that divide us."
"We are not defined by the color of our skin, the figure on our paycheck or the party of our politics," Trump told an American Legion conference Wednesday in Reno. "We are defined by our shared humanity, by our citizenship in this magnificent nation and by the love that fills our hearts."
Trump's businesslike speech, read from a teleprompter, contrasted sharply with his ad-libbed tirade Tuesday night in Phoenix, where he told cheering supporters that the news media had misreported his reaction to the recent deadly violence at a neo-Nazi and white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Va.
Trump omitted the statements that sparked outrage across the political spectrum _ that some "very fine people" were marching alongside the white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and that "many sides" were to blame for the violence in Charlottesville.
In Reno, Trump referred only elliptically to the controversy.
"It is time to heal the wounds that divide us and to seek a new unity based on the common values that unite us," he told the crowd in Reno.
