Republicans unite to condemn white supremacists after Trump remarks

British journalist Robert Fisk famously described the scene as “the most staged photo opportunity since Iwo Jima”.

In the end, hundreds of thousands of heroic Americans gave their lives to destroy the greatest evil the world has ever known, which established a totalitarian state, dreamed of enslaving “inferior” races, and put to death six million innocent people.

The president’s criticism came just two days after Flake himself took a backhanded swipe at Trump over his widely panned response to the white supremacist violence in Virginia, saying “we can’t claim to be the party of Lincoln if we equivocate in condemning white supremacy”.

The latest flash point occurred this past weekend when the former Confederate stronghold of Charlottesville, Virginia, descended into chaos following rallies of white supremacist groups protesting the removal of statues celebrating leaders of the defeated Confederate states.

Following the horrific events in Charlottesville, Va., where one woman was killed during a white supremacist rally to save a statue of Robert E. Lee, cities across the country are moving swiftly to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces.

“The people who grieve the suffering of the soldiers of the Confederacy and are on their loss”.

“They needed to come down”, Pugh said, per the Sun.

Democrats, nearly to a person, have insisted on calling out the right-wing hate groups by name, assigning them full blame and highlighting the fact that the Republican president has been reluctant to do that. They did more good for the country than bad. On the issue of Charlottesville and Civil War statues, Donald Trump is approaching Luray Cavern depth, and he’s still shoveling away. At the start of Saturday’s demonstrations, so-called “alt-right” protesters loudly chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” Marchers chanted Nazi slogans like, “Blood and soil” and “Sieg Heil” throughout the night. Acting on the advice of his fascist advisers, particularly chief political strategist Stephen Bannon, Trump is cultivating a definite social layer of ultra-rightists, white supremacists and outright neo-Nazis. Winning three brevet promotions on the battlefields of the Mexican War and solving engineering challenges posed by rivers and harbors in cities like St. Louis, he was marked to be a general in America’s next war.

But Trump’s impromptu remarks at a Tuesday press conference – originally meant to focus on infrastructure – represented a strong swing back to his original position, which suggested equivalency between white supremacist groups and the “alt-right”, on one hand, and the groups that opposed them, like Black Lives Matter and leftist anti-fascist protesters, on the other. She says Americans’ monuments to the Confederacy are unusual for several reasons.

There are no two sides about it. “People can hop on Google and they can Google official records of the War of Rebellion”. On the eve of his execution, McVeigh chose the William Ernest Henley poem Invictus or “Unconquerable” to serve as his final statement. There is nothing “white supremacist” about Trump’s tweets regarding the statues. They stand, plain and simple, as symbols of hatred and oppression.

But by Tuesday, he not only returned to his many-sides equivalence but added that there were many “fine people” on both sides.

Trump initially stated that there was violence “on many sides”, as NPR has reported.

While not a new issue, after what happened in Charlottesville, emotions have intensified on both sides of the debate.

On Tuesday, and again in tweets Thursday morning, Trump condemned the removal of such symbols, proclaiming their value as “history and culture”.

Lee monuments, memorials and schools in his name erected at the turn of the 20th Century are now facing scrutiny amid a demographically changing nation.

The President is wrong.

“Taking down monuments will not erase our shared history”.

New York City’s Civil War history is complicated and perhaps under-mentioned. Commemorations in public spaces should recall the past and also provide inspiration and hope for the future. Much of that history is being debated, even by our own president, who equated Robert E. Lee to founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson recently. “We are acknowledging there is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it”.

Federal Bureau of Investigation special counsel Robert Mueller, who is now investigating whether Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russian Federation during the election, can’t move to remove Trump from office if he finds that Trump has committed a crime.