President Donald Trump bitingly decried the rising movement to pull down monuments to Confederate icons on Thursday. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” he tweeted.
Mr. Trump’s new remarks came even as the White house tried to manage his increasing isolation and the continued fallout from his combative comments on last weekend’s racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Pressured by advisers, the President had taken a step back from the dispute on Monday, two days after he had enraged many by declining to single out the white supremacists and neo-Nazis whose demonstration against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statute had led to violence and the death of a counter-protester in Charlottesville.
“You can’t change history, but you can learn from it,” he tweeted. “Robert E. Lee. Stonewall Jackson who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish... Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on Wednesday that Mr. Trump “took a step backward by again suggesting there is moral equivalency” between the marching white supremacists and the people who had been demonstrating against them.
Nuanced remarks
Other Republicans, including the most powerful in Congress, have been making strong statements on Charlottesville and racism, but few have been mentioning Mr. Trump himself.
The Senate’s top Republican, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, condemned “hate and bigotry”. House Speaker Paul Ryan charged that, “White supremacy is repulsive”. But neither criticised the President’s insistence that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the violent weekend clash in Virginia.
The nuanced statements reflect the party establishment’s delicate dance. Few top Republican officeholders want to defend the President in the midst of an escalating political crisis, yet they are unwilling to declare all-out opposition to him and risk alienating his loyalists.
In another major sign of discontent within the Republican Party, Mr. Trump abruptly abolished two of his White House business councils on Wednesday as corporate chiefs began resigning in protest of his statements.
The White House is trying to deal with the repercussions from Mr. Trump’s defiant remarks on the Virginia tragedy. Advisers hunkered down, offering no public defence while privately expressing frustration with his comments.
But Mr. Trump himself was increasing rather than slowing his tweet-a-thon.
On Wednesday, he had told associates he was pleased with how his combative press conference had gone a day earlier, saying he believed he had effectively stood up to the media, according to three people familiar with the conversations who demanded anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly about them.
