When I was a student in the Houston public schools in the 1950s, our US history textbooks reflected the Southern view of the Civil War. We learned about the brilliance of Robert E. Lee, the perfidy of the North in forcing a brutal Reconstruction on the states of the South, the ignorant Negroes (sic) who lorded it over dispossessed whites during Reconstruction. We didn’t learn much about the abolitionists or the Ku Klux Klan. We didn’t learn about the cruel abuse of black slaves. Fortunately, when I studied US history on college, I encountered a different, accurate version of history, and in graduate school, read historians such as Eric Foner. I learned that Reconstruction legislatures, for example, passed the most progressive legislation the South had ever known. I learned that the end of Reconstruction began an era of whites terrorizing blacks into submission and abandonment of whatever rights had been guaranteed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, passed after the Civil War at a time when ex-Confederate soldiers had lost their right to vote and were unable to block them.

Donald Trump seems to have studied the white Southern version of US history and has never read or heard anything to correct that interpretation of the Civil War.

Today, despite the overwhelmingly negative response to his Tuesday press conference from Republivans and European leaders, he issued several tweets lamenting the removal of Confederate monuments. To him, they are heroes, although they were in fact traitors who wanted to dissolve the USA. He clearly does not know that most of these statues were erected 50-70 years after the war, at the height of Jim Crow segregation and served as symbols of white dominance.

I recall during the campaign last fall that he appealed to black voters and said “What the hell do you have to lose” by voting Trump. Now we know.

Ignorance can be cured by education. However, a closed mind never learns anything new that challenges their preconceptions and prejudices.

My favorite news show is Lawrence O’Donnell. Last night, he branded Trump “Divider-in-Chief.” A good description of this man who is so thin-skinned that he lashes out at anyone who dares to disagree with him. Yesterday–which seems like a year ago–Trump retweeted an image of the “Trump Train” rolling over a human labeled CNN. The tweet was deleted. But it showed the fascistic temperament of the man who retweeted it, as well as the gross insensitivity of displaying this image after a fascist had used his car to kill Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.