Of Course Trump Is Obsessed With a Confederate General Who Thought Black People Should Be Property

We can’t count on a lot in life, but one thing we can count on is that, at any given moment, Donald Trump will say something fucked up and racist. A very short, in no way exhaustive list of things that have come out of his mouth includes telling four congresswoman of color to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” when three-quarters of the group “came from” the U.S.; reportedly calling Haiti and various African countries “shithole countries”; calling COVID-19 “kung flu”; and describing Baltimore, whose population is majority Black, a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being” would “want to live.” That, of course, does not include the time he praised a group of white nationalists and neo-Nazis and said it had some very fine people among it, or when he refused to condemn “white supremacist and militia groups” during one of the 2020 presidential debates. Or when he banned travel to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim nations. Or when he called Mexicans rapists and criminals. Or when he started an entire movement based on the idea that the first Black president in our country’s history could not possibly have been born in the United States. As you can see, the list goes on and on.

So obviously, it wasn’t much of a surprise when Trump flew off the handle after Virginia removed a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who the ex-president insisted was one of the greatest military leaders of all time, despite the inconvenient fact that he literally fought for white people to be able to continue owning Black people.

Per Politico:

“Robert E. Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all,” Trump said in the statement. “President Lincoln wanted him to command the North, in which case the war would have been over in one day. Robert E. Lee instead chose the other side because of his great love of Virginia, and except for Gettysburg, would have won the war. He should be remembered as perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over, ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation and imploring his soldiers to do their duty in becoming good citizens of this Country,” Trump added.

“Except for Gettysburg.” We’re just going to leave that one right there.

Lee was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans as he led the fight to defend the South’s ability to own Black people as property. Lee has been lifted up as a heroic figure in the South, even today, an ideology that historians call the Lost Cause—a campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the Civil War, pushing the idea that the Confederate fight was a heroic one. In The Atlantic, Historian David Blight wrote that it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow System.”

Okay, so obviously your standard Trump racism, though here’s where things take an unexpected turn to the hilarious:

In Wednesday’s statement, Trump said that if Lee were to have commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the country would have seen victory years ago. “What an embarrassment we are suffering because we don’t have the genius of a Robert. E. Lee!” Trump said.

Ah yes, if Lee had been commanding troops over in Afghanistan we totally would have won that war, right, yes. Lee definitely wouldn’t have been too busy asking people questions like, “Um, guys? What’s a tank? What’s an airplane? Where’s my musket?”

[Lee’s] 21-foot-high bronze statue was lowered to the ground in Richmond on Wednesday morning, as a joyous crowd of hundreds cheered. A work crew cut the statue into pieces in order to haul it away to an undisclosed state-owned facility until a decision is made about where it will go next. Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia called for the statue’s removal last summer as the nation protested the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Wednesday’s move was a watershed moment for activists whose calls have been pushed aside for years.