Trump decries monument removals
President Donald Trump bitingly decried Thursday the rising movement to pull down monuments to Confederate icons, declaring the nation is seeing “the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart.”
Trump’s new remarks came even as the White house tried to manage his increasing isolation and the continued fallout from his combative comments on last weekend’s racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Va.
He also tore into fellow Republicans who have criticized his statements on race and politics, fanning the controversy toward a full-fledged national conflagration.
Pressured by advisers, the president had taken a step back from the dispute Monday, two days after he had enraged many by declining to single out the white supremacists and neonazis whose demonstration against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statute had led to violence and the death of a counter-protester in Charlottesville.
He returned to his combative stance on Wednesday — insisting anew “both sides” were to blame. And then in a burst of tweets on Thursday he renewed his criticism of efforts to remove memorials and tributes to the Civil War Confederacy.
“You can’t change history, but you can learn from it,” he tweeted. “Robert E. Lee. Stonewall Jackson — who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish . ...
“Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”
He wasn’t talking about beauty in earlier tweets, lashing at GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona.
He accused “publicity-seeking” Graham of falsely stating his position on the demonstrators, called Flake “toxic” and praised a Flake 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. And Flake has been increasingly critical of Trump in recent weeks.
Other Republicans, including the most powerful in Congress, have been making strong statements on Charlottesville and racism, but few have been mentioning Trump himself.
The Senate’s top Republican, Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, condemned “hate and bigotry.” House Speaker Paul Ryan charged that, “White supremacy is repulsive.”
But neither criticized the president’s insistence that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the violent weekend clash in Virginia.