Trump lashes out on Twitter
BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — With prominent Republicans openly questioning his competence and moral leadership, President Donald Trump on Thursday burrowed deeper into the racially charged debate over Confederate memorials and lashed out at members of his own party in the latest controversy to engulf his presidency.
Out of sight, but still online, Trump tweeted his defence of monuments to Confederate icons — bemoaning rising efforts to remove them as an attack on America’s “history and culture.”
And he berated his critics who, with increasingly sharper language, have denounced his initially slow and then ultimately combative comments on the racial violence at a white supremacist rally last weekend in Charlottesville, Va.
Trump was much quicker Thursday to condemn violence in Barcelona, where more than a dozen people were killed when a van veered onto a sidewalk and sped down a busy pedestrian zone in what authorities called a terror attack.
He then added to his expression of support a tweet reviving a debunked legend about a U.S. general subduing Muslim rebels a century ago in the Philippines by shooting them with bullets dipped in pig blood.
“Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!” Trump wrote.
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said Trump’s “moral authority is compromised.”
Trump accused “publicityseeking” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina of falsely stating Trump’s position on the demonstrators and called Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake “toxic” and praised Flake’s potential primary election opponent.
Graham said Wednesday that Trump “took a step backward by again suggesting there is moral equivalency” between the marching white supremacists and the people who had been demonstrating against them. Flake has been increasingly critical of Trump in recent weeks.