Trump praises Gen. Robert E. Lee after Confederate statue removed in Richmond, Va.
He’s a “genius” who would’ve conquered Afghanistan if only he had the chance.
Former President Trump isn’t talking up the military skills of Gen. George Patton or perhaps Gen. Colin Powell.
Nope, the #MAGA man was waxing poetically about pro-slavery Gen. Robert E. Lee after the Confederate leader’s statue was taken down in Richmond, Virginia.
Trump late Wednesday called Lee, who led the South’s army in the Civil War, “the greatest strategist of them all” and “perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over.”
He even mused that Lee could’ve whacked the Taliban, a task that Trump himself failed to carry out during four years in the White House.
“If only we had Robert E. Lee to command our troops in Afghanistan, that disaster would have ended in a complete and total victory many years ago,” Trump said.
Crowds cheered as the iconic statue was removed from its base in a square on Richmond’s Monument Ave. Authorities pulled down the memorial as a symbol of racism, slavery and hatred after winning a long court battle.
Trump and many of his white nationalist supporters have watched in dismay in recent years as racial justice advocates successfully push to remove Confederate statues in cities nationwide.
Most of the statues were erected during the Jim Crow era when the Ku Klux Klan fanned a wave of nostalgic racist propaganda about slavery and the Civil War.
The city of Charlottesville recently also pulled down a statue of Lee that was the focus of an infamous white nationalist rally in 2017 in which a far right-wing protester drove into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing one woman.
Trump, who was president at the time, infamously later said there were “very good people on both sides” of the violence.
“Our culture is being destroyed and our history and heritage, both good and bad, are being extinguished by the Radical Left,” Trump wrote in an email message. “We can’t let that happen!”