As you might have heard, Donald Trump got himself into a little bit of hot water yesterday.
Already under fire for waiting some 48 hours to explicitly fault white supremacists for the violence that stemmed from … well … from a rally organized by white supremacists, Trump turned the crazy knob up to a Spinal Tap-ish “11” at a press conference in New York on Tuesday.
You can read the full recap here, but for the purposes of this post, just note that at one point during the exceedingly bizarre proceedings, Trump launched into an orange-faced rant about the removal of Robert E. Lee statues and what that presaged for monuments to Thomas Jefferson who, he reminded one reporter, “was a major slave owner.”
Trump: Jefferson was a "major slave owner… are we going to take down the statue?… you're changing history, you're changing culture." pic.twitter.com/IIoIuxbKfK
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) August 15, 2017
That, along with pretty much everything else he said over the course of a truly surreal Q&A session, cost him the support of corporate America on Wednesday and drew the ire of nearly every lawmaker in Washington.
You’re reminded that this whole thing started on Friday when a group of Tiki torch-wielding white nationalists trekked through the University of Virginia’s campus to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park.
Well, in the final and most hilarious insult of the day for Trump, his stance on Lee and on white nationalism in general has now been officially rebuked by … wait for it … Robert E. Lee.
Or at least General Lee’s ghost.
Here’s CNN:
The great-great grandson of Gen. Robert E. Lee condemned last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia and said it might be “appropriate” for Confederate statues to be exhibited in a museum.
“Eventually, someone is going to have to make a decision, and if that’s the local lawmaker, so be it. But we have to be able to have that conversation without all of the hatred and the violence. And if they choose to take those statues down, fine,” Robert E. Lee V, 54, of Washington DC, told CNN’s Polo Sandoval.
“Maybe it’s appropriate to have them in museums or to put them in some sort of historical context in that regard,” he added.
Lee, who works as an athletic director at a Virginia school, called Saturday’s incidents “senseless” and “sad” for his family.
“Those sorts of acts on Saturday, that’s just not to be tolerated,” he said. “We feel strongly that Gen. Lee would never ever stand for that sort of violence.”
In a statement, the Lee family said the life of the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia “was about duty, honor and country.”
“At the end of the Civil War, he implored the nation to come together to heal our wounds and to move forward to become a more unified nation,” the statement said. “He never would have tolerated the hateful words and violent actions of white supremacists, the KKK, or neo-Nazis.”
So to all the folks out there fighting to keep General Lee’s statues from falling, just know that his great-great grandson thinks they should probably come down.
And, in a speech from the great beyond, General Lee himself has this message for Donald Trump:
In news relevant to Trump’s national confession yesterday, Trump stated to for al to hear:
“So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down.”
And in a quiet fuck you to Trump, dateline …
“BALTIMORE – Confederate monuments in Baltimore were quietly removed and hauled away on trucks in darkness early Wednesday, days after a violent white nationalist rally in Virginia that was sparked by plans to take down a similar statue there.
“Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh told The Baltimore Sun that crews began removing the city’s four Confederate monuments late Tuesday and finished around 5:30 a.m. Wednesday.
“It’s done,” Pugh told the newspaper. “They needed to come down. My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could.”
“Video taken by WBAL-TV shows workers using a crane to lift the towering monument to Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson onto a flatbed truck in the dark.
The monuments have everything to do with erecting monuments to black voter deprivation, segregation, discrimination, white supremacy and 20th-century racial tension. Mother Jones puts it like this:
“Yes, these monuments were put up to honor Confederate leaders. But the timing of the monument building makes it pretty clear what the real motivation was: to physically symbolize white terror against blacks. They were mostly built during times when Southern whites were engaged in vicious campaigns of subjugation against blacks, and during those campaigns the message sent by a statue of Robert E. Lee in front of a courthouse was loud and clear.
“No one should think that these statues were meant to be somber postbellum reminders of a brutal war. They were built much later, and most of them were explicitly created to accompany organized and violent efforts to subdue blacks and maintain white supremacy in the South. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a lot of Southerners don’t really understand this, but they should learn. There’s a reason blacks consider these statues to be symbols of bigotry and terror. It’s because they are.”
These hulks of metal were erected to intimidate African Americans as part of an entire institutionalized form of intimidation evidenced by the behavior, actions and words of men made up White Citizens’ Councils mostly in the south, or figures like George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, or Bull Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham, Alabama, who enforced racial segregation and denied civil rights to black citizens, and who directed the use of fire hoses and police attack dogs against civil rights activists and children protestors, and much worse.
I’m glad to see the comments and statement from Robert E Lee V, however don’t be fooled into whitewashing of the general’s legacy. He was a traitor to the country and a failed military tactician, on one hand. But the stories of his brutality against his and others slaves, his sitting idly by while free Northern blacks were taken prisoner by the Confederacy and immediately turned into slaves, and the consistent and deliberate breaking up of slaves families all paint a clearer picture of who he was.