Trump: Statue removals ‘foolish’
In tweets, president repeats vile myth after Spain carnage
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump further inflamed the incendiary debate over the nation’s Confederate memorials Thursday, saying American culture was “being ripped apart” by their removal.
Trump excited that base Tuesday when he defended the monuments during a chaotic news conference. Then he said that their future should be left to localities. But by redoubling his opposition to the statues’ removal Thursday, the president is certain to roil the local debates.
“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” Trump tweeted.
“You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson — who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!” he added.
Trump’s equation of Lee and Jackson, who took up arms for the South’s secession, with founders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson echoed one of the arguments that defenders of the Confederate monuments make.
Trump also lashed out at some perceived Senate enemies Thursday, and he repeated a religiously offensive myth about an American general using bullets bathed in pigs’ blood to kill Muslim terrorists.
His fusillade came throughout the day on Twitter even as critics, including in Trump’s party, implored him to instead try to unite the nation.
As the president continued his working vacation at his golf club in New Jersey, his aides were left to deal with the fallout from his tweets and verbal blasts in the days since a march by white separatists provoked deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va.
He accused “publicityseeking” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina of falsely stating Trump’s position on the demonstrators. He 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.
Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said Trump’s “moral authority is compromised.”
For Trump, the challenge of governing has grown ever more daunting since he took office in January without the usual bounce of popularity for a new president. As his support has declined, he has relied more on his most ardent supporters, who generally are white, older, non-urban and deeply conservative.
After news broke Thursday of a terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, Trump repeated a dubious myth he had previously invoked on the campaign trail, to much criticism, about a general who used bullets coated in pigs’ blood to execute insurgents in the Philippines in the early 20th century; to followers of Islam, pigs are impure.
“Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” he tweeted. “There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”
Trump’s quick condemnation of the Barcelona carnage as a terrorist attack, and his suggestion that Muslims were at fault, came before Spanish authorities had released conclusive information. As such, Trump’s rapid response contrasted with his slowness in calling out the white supremacists in Charlottesville — blame he rescinded Tuesday, when he said “both sides” were culpable — and contradicted his claim that he only comments on such incidents after all the facts are known.
Trump has not called the fatal attack in Charlottesville, in which a car driven by an alleged white supremacist plowed into a crowd, an act of terrorism.
His tweets extolling Confederate memorials drew a link to the threats many of his far-right followers see to the nation’s cultural identity. Separately, his adviser, Steve Bannon, egged on the escalating culture wars in rare public comments.
As Trump plans a rally Tuesday in Arizona, the mayor of Phoenix has asked him to stay away in the interests of public safety, a perhaps unprecedented request to a sitting president.
The state is home to Flake, who has written a book critical of Trump, as well as Sen. John McCain, whom Trump also mocked this week to reignite their long-running feud.
The president tweeted praise for Republican Kelli Ward, a former Arizona state senator who plans to challenge Flake next year — after she recently suggested that McCain step down, given his cancer diagnosis, so the governor could appoint her in his place.
While Trump’s public approval has hovered near 40 percent, some of that support is soft. Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, looking at a range of recent polls, estimated his hard-core backing at about 1 in 4 Americans.