Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 01:39 pm
Former President Donald Trump released an angry statement praising the “genius” of Robert E. Lee after authorities in Richmond, Virginia removed a statue of the Confederate leader.
“Robert E. Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all,” Trump said in a statement released by his Save America PAC. He insisted that Lee joined “the other side,” that of slaveowners, “because of his great love of Virginia” and said he would have led the South to victory in the Civil War had it not been for a great loss at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Trump ended his statement by claiming that that “our culture is being destroyed and our history and heritage, both good and bad, are being extinguished by the Radical Left.” In a dig at President Joe Biden, he claimed that if Lee were in charge of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, then “that disaster would have ended in a complete and total victory many years ago.
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Trump, in a lengthy statement, decries the removal of Richmond's Robert E. Lee statue, calling it "magnificent."
"If only we had Robert E. Lee to command our troops in Afghanistan… What an embarrassment we are suffering because we don’t have the genius of a Robert E. Lee!" pic.twitter.com/cRoLoUp5br
— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) September 8, 2021
Residents of Richmond, Virginia cheered as a statue was taken down yesterday.
The statue had been the center of controversy for some time.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam first ordered it to be taken down in June 2020, as the nation brewed with calls for a racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
However, the order was delayed after opponents mounted legal challenges to keep the monument in place. The Supreme Court eventually sided with the state of Virginia.
Alan is a writer, editor, and news junkie based in New York.
