Trump mourns ‘beautiful statues and monuments’
Political rhetoric over Southern icons nears boiling point
President Donald Trump on Thursday mourned the loss of “beautiful statues and monuments” in the wake of the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia during a white supremacist demonstration protesting the planned removal of a statue depicting Confederate military commander Robert E. Lee.
Trump tweeted: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You ....
“...can’t change history, but you can learn from it. 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!”
Trump’s string of morning tweets made clear the president was not willing to back down over his claims Tuesday that some of the demonstrators had legitimate grievances over the loss of Southern “history,” and that “both sides” were to blame in the mayhem that left a woman dead and at least 19 more injured. Some white supremacist leaders, including David Duke, the former KKK grand wizard, have praised Trump for his “honesty” and “courage.”
During his remarks Tuesday and again in his tweets Thursday, Trump argued that Lee and fellow Confederate general Jackson, who commanded Southern forces in the Civil War to secede from the United States, are important and admired historical figures in the South. He said they could be equated to Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves and thus could potentially be subject to a modern- day backlash that would tarnish their legacies.
Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, said in interviews this week that he relishes a fight with Democrats over cultural issues because it will allow the president to “crush” his rivals by focusing on the economy.
“The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” Bannon told the American Prospect. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D- Calif., issued a statement calling on Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to join Democrats in efforts to remove Confederate statues from the halls of the Capitol. Those statues are generally selected by individual states to represent them.
“The statues in the Capitol should embody our highest ideals as Americans, expressing who we are and who we aspire to be as a nation,” Pelosi said. “The Confederate statues in the halls of Congress have always been reprehensible.”