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Version 4 Version 5
Trump ‘Sad’ Over Removal of ‘Our Beautiful Statues’ Defiant, Trump Laments Assault on Culture and Revives a Bogus Pershing Story
(about 5 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Under fire for defending racist activist groups, President Trump said on Twitter on Thursday that he was “sad” to see United States’ history torn apart by the removal of “our beautiful statues and monuments,” echoing a popular refrain of white supremacist groups that oppose the removal of Confederate monuments. WASHINGTON — Despite ongoing rebukes over his defense of white supremacists, President Trump defiantly returned to his campaign’s nativist themes on Thursday. He lamented an assault on American “culture,” revived a bogus, century-old story about killing Muslim extremists and attacked Republicans with a renewed vigor.
Officials in several states have called for the removal of public monuments that have become symbols of the Confederacy. Hours after a terrorist attack in Spain, Mr. Trump recalled a debunked event in which Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing supposedly killed Muslim rebels in the Philippines by shooting them with bullets dipped in the blood of pigs, which Muslims are forbidden to eat. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack in Barcelona, where the driver of a van crashed into a busy tourist boulevard, killing 13.
Later Thursday, Mr. Trump sent out another tweet praising the counterterrorism tactics of Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, who fought insurgents in the Philippines in the early 1900s. “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” Mr. Trump tweeted, spreading a mythical story even as he again accused the news media of being “Fake News” in another tweet. “There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”
Most historians say the episodes cited by the president — including ordering bullets dipped in the blood of pigs, which Muslims are prohibited from eating — are unproven legends stemming from battles around 1911. The rebellion did not end until 1913, and the region was still chaotic for decades after Pershing’s time there — indicating that even if the mythical tactics took place, they did not work. As when he trafficked in the same unproven legend during the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump ignored the conclusions of historians, who repeatedly have said it did not happen. Additionally, his claim that Pershing ended terrorism in the Philippines for 35 years is refuted by the violence that continued for decades after the rebellion that ended in 1913.
The early-morning Twitter posts were the latest in his escalating remarks that critics contend validate white supremacist groups who led a bloody rally over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va. The proposed removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a public park in Charlottesville spurred the demonstrations. Mr. Trump also appeared in peril of losing support from key Republicans he will need to advance his agenda in Congress. Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, questioned the president’s “stability,” and Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, declared Mr. Trump’s moral authority is “compromised.”
Mr. Trump’s comments on the Confederate monuments on Thursday appeared to shift attention away from his remarks that “both sides” were to blame for the violence in Charlottesville, and instead focus the debate on the historical argument to keep the statues in place. Mr. Corker, a sober voice on foreign policy and a frequent ally of the Trump administration, bluntly questioned the president’s ability to perform the duties of his office.
Many people who do not identify as white supremacists support keeping the monuments as a connection to their history and heritage. “The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability, nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful,” Mr. Corker told reporters. He said Mr. Trump had not “appropriately spoken to the nation” about Charlottesville, Va.
A NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll on Monday and Tuesday of 1,125 adults showed 86 percent of the Republicans surveyed thought Confederate statues should remain in place as a symbol of history. Mr. Scott, of South Carolina, insisted that he would not “defend the indefensible” when it came to the president’s comments about “both sides” in Charlottesville being responsible for the violence last Saturday.
Mr. Trump’s tweets came the morning after his personal lawyer forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that painted Lee in glowing terms and echoed secessionist sentiment from the Civil War era. “What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority,” Mr. Scott said in an interview with Vice. “And that moral authority is compromised when Tuesday happens — there’s no question about that,” he said, noting the president’s angry remarks to reporters this week in Manhattan, where Mr. Trump criticized the “alt-left” while abandoning earlier condemnations of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis.
On Saturday, the day of the protests, Mr. Trump did not condemn neo-Nazis or white supremacists in his public remarks about the violence, prompting criticism that his omission suggested support for the racist groups. An Ohio man with white supremacist ties is accused of driving his car into a crowd, killing one woman and injuring 19 people. Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump made clear that he has no intention of stepping back from his assertions about the Charlottesville rally that have drawn widespread condemnation. In three tweets, Mr. Trump defended Civil War-era statues, using language very similar to that of white supremacists to argue the statues should remain in place.
Two days later, Mr. Trump bowed to pressure and said racism was “evil” and named racist organizations in his follow-up remarks about Charlottesville. But on Tuesday, Mr. Trump reverted to his initial public posture and blamed “both sides” for the violence. On Twitter, Mr. Trump called it “foolish” to remove statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and mused that monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be next. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” the president wrote.
Mr. Trump said many of those who opposed the statue’s removal were good people protesting the loss of their culture, and he questioned whether taking down statues of Lee could lead to monuments of George Washington also being removed. And as he faced a new round of bipartisan denunciations, Mr. Trump also lashed out at two senior Republican senators who have been unsparing in their criticism during the past week.
Most of the statues were erected in the 1890s, as Jim Crow laws were being established, and in the 1950s, during a period of Southern resistance to the civil rights movement. The president accused Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, of “publicity seeking” and said that Mr. Graham had uttered a “disgusting lie” when he said — accurately — that the president had equated the white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville with the counterprotesters who were there to oppose them.
Some in favor of keeping the statues argue that the interpretation of the monuments could be revised to teach future generations about white privilege. But practically, that is unrealistic, said W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a history professor at the University of North Carolina. Mr. Brundage said it would be expensive to add explanatory plaques next to the Confederate monuments, and that may not be a prominent enough display of the reinterpretation. “He just can’t forget his election trouncing,” the president said of Mr. Graham, who waged a losing bid against Mr. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. “The people of South Carolina will remember!”
To those who argue that the statues are not about hate but heritage, Mr. Brundage said relocating them to a museum would not erase the heritage. Mr. Trump also called Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, “toxic” and “WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor” in the Senate. He praised Mr. Flake’s Republican primary race opponent.
“You’re not erasing history,” Mr. Brundage said. “You’re just transforming a landscape so that you can make it one you’re comfortable living in.” There was new evidence on Thursday that the political crisis created by the president’s Charlottesville remarks was having an effect on Mr. Trump’s business. The Cleveland Clinic announced it was pulling out of a 2018 fund-raiser at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., and the head of the Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce urged businesses not to host events there.
Corey Stewart, a Republican who has said he plans to run against Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, in 2018, defended Mr. Trump on Thursday. The American Cancer Society, which had planned to hold its 2018 gala at Mar-a-Lago, announced it, too, would change the venue, citing its “values and commitment to diversity.”
“The president is absolutely right,” Mr. Stewart, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman in Virginia, said on CNN. “After they get done removing statues to Confederate generals because, arguably, they fought to preserve the institution of slavery, they are going right after slave owners, including the founders — Jefferson, Madison, Washington — and when you undermine the founding fathers, you undermine the founding documents, namely the Constitution of the United States.” “It has become increasingly clear that the challenge to those values is outweighing other business considerations,” the group said in a statement.
The White House announced that Mr. Trump had decided to cancel plans to assemble a President’s Advisory Council on Infrastructure. The decision to abandon the business group came a day after a revolt among industry leaders on two other advisory panels forced the president to disband them.
And Carmen de Lavallade, a dancer and choreographer who will be honored by the Kennedy Center in December, announced on Thursday that she will forgo the related reception at the White House.
“In light of the socially divisive and morally caustic narrative that our current leadership is choosing to engage in, and in keeping with the principles that I and so many others have fought for, I will be declining the invitation to attend the reception at the White House,” Ms. de Lavallade, 86, said in a statement.
Even so, White House officials said Mr. Trump was in good spirits on Thursday as he continued a working vacation at his estate in Bedminster, N.J. He dined with Richard LeFrak, a longtime friend, at the president’s golf course, according to a person briefed on the dinner.
Mr. Trump also held meetings with Gov. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, and Linda McMahon, the head of the Small Business Administration. But both events were closed to the news media, depriving the president of any further ability to engage in another back-and-forth with reporters.
Within his administration, his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, was said to be deeply frustrated and unsure how to contain his boss. And pressure mounted on Gary D. Cohn, the director of the White House National Economic Council, who is Jewish and had privately expressed dismay about the president’s remarks.
Unconfirmed reports that Mr. Cohn was about to resign prompted a statement from a White House official: “Nothing has changed. Gary is focused on his responsibilities as N.E.C. director and any reports to the contrary are 100 percent false.”
For the president, Thursday was a return to themes that were last on display in the weeks and months after he won the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 9, 2016.
During that period, he praised dictators like Saddam Hussein as effective counterforces on terrorism and declared his support for enhanced interrogation techniques that have been outlawed as a form of torture. “Torture works,” Mr. Trump said in South Carolina that month.
That was the same month that Mr. Trump first alluded to a legend — thoroughly debunked by numerous historians — about Pershing, then governor of the Moro Province in the Philippines, and his use of pig’s blood.
Mr. Trump’s remarks about the Civil War statues were also an echo of his campaign, and are not unlike sentiments in the South that the monuments and Confederate history reflect “heritage not hate” — a phrase commonly used by groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
“To those 70 million of us whose ancestors fought for the South, it is a symbol of family members who fought for what they thought was right in their time, and whose valor became legendary in military history,” Ben Jones, a former Democratic congressman from Georgia, wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times in 2015.
Critics say the president’s remarks reflect a dangerously sanitized view of a war to uphold slavery and destroy the union. And they say the comparison with the Founding Fathers is entirely off base: Unlike the Southerners who helped found the country, the issue with Civil War monuments is that they honor people who took up arms against the United States, at least in part, to maintain slavery, critics say.
Mr. Trump saw it otherwise. “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 tweeted.