Charlottesville mayor calls for swift removal of Robert E. Lee statue

For Susan Bro, mother of the woman killed at a rally organized by white supremacists, the president of the United States can offer no healing words. Recent polls show that some 62 percent of Americans support preserving the monuments as historic symbols, and 67 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s statement on Charlottesville. “It has to happen”, Senator Bob Corker told reporters in his home state of Tennessee.

Separately, billionaire investor Carl Icahn informed Trump in a letter Friday that he was stepping down from his informal role advising the White House on its deregulation efforts.

Mayor Mike Signer’s statement comes almost a week after white supremacists descended on the city and violently clashed with counter protesters.

It’s true, as Trump said, that both sides in Charlottesville engaged in acts of street violence.

“You can’t change history, but you can learn from it”, he tweeted.

This awful incident started as a reasonable civic demonstration by Southern traditionalists who were not hostile to African-Americans but object to the shamed renunciation of a great American heroic and folkloric figure from “Gone With the Wind, ” to The Bands “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, ” to “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Robert E. Lee was not a precursor of Bull Connor, Strom Thurmond, James Earl Ray, or the unreformed George C. Wallace.

– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017.the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!

The latest targets of the president’s wrath are Lindsey Graham of SC and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

He accused “publicity-seeking” Graham of falsely stating his position on the demonstrators, called Flake “toxic” and praised a Flake primary election opponent.

A driver rammed his auto into people demonstrating along a crowded, narrow street near the University of Virginia.

Three hundred miles south in a Charleston, West Virginia, shopping mall, Joyce Ash took a moment to ponder Trump after buying a dress Wednesday to wear to the funeral for her husband of 33 years, who died of pancreatic cancer.

Because he can’t think on his feet, because he doesn’t know how to say the right thing at the right time, because he thinks he’s got to win every petty argument with the anti-Trump media, the president has mired himself unnecessarily in yet another controversy of his own making.

These hate groups gathered momentum in reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests that arose after the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and others.

He and his daughter Ivanka Trump quietly traveled February 1 to Dover Air Force Base in DE for the return of the remains of a U.S. Navy SEAL killed during a raid in Yemen, William “Ryan” Owens. “None of the marchers spewing such verbiage could be considered ‘very fine people” as the President suggested”. And even some members of the Society for the Protection of Spineless Conservative Politicians, otherwise known as the leadership of the Republican Party, were starting to distance themselves from him, albeit hesitantly and anonymously, via leaks to journalists and statements from well-connected intermediaries.

And the White House said Thursday that it was abandoning plans to form an infrastructure advisory council.

“Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both”.

Some White House officials do privately worry about slippage in Trump’s support from congressional Republicans, particularly in the Senate. Advisers hunkered down, offering no public defense while privately expressing frustration with his comments.

The mixed messages coming from the White House have only fueled the escalating rhetoric from “alt-right” figures and notable white supremacists – many of whom cheered Trump’s statements Tuesday.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who stood next to Trump during his press conference on Tuesday, told staffers at a meeting the next day that he didn’t share the president’s stance on neo-Nazis, according to Bloomberg.

Early this week, Trump had said he will speak to Bro.

Wouldn’t it be glorious if the media devoted just one-third of the time they spend trashing Trump to covering his policy agenda – albeit as unfair as that reportage would be?

Bykowicz reported from Washington.