Trump spoke in Ohio.
LEBANON, Ohio — President Trump praised the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee while asking African American voters to “honor us” by voting Republican at an Ohio rally that featured an unexpected and provocative monologue on America’s Civil War history.
Addressing an open-air rally of around 4,000 supporters, Trump appeared buoyant as he declared that Lee was a “true great fighter” and “great general.” He also said President Abraham Lincoln once had a “phobia” of the Southern general, whose support of slavery has made his legacy a heavily contested and divisive issue.
The comments came during an anecdote about Ohio-born President Ulysses S. Grant’s alleged drinking problems. “So Robert E. Lee was a great general. And Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia. He couldn’t beat Robert E. Lee,” Trump said. “Robert E. Lee was winning battle after battle after battle.”
“And Abraham Lincoln came home, he said, ‘I can’t beat Robert E. Lee,’ ” Trump said. “They said to Lincoln, ‘You can’t use him anymore, he’s an alcoholic.’ And Lincoln said, ‘I don’t care if he’s an alcoholic, frankly, give me six or seven more just like him.’ He started to win.”
Minutes earlier, Trump had hailed African American unemployment numbers and asked black voters to “honor us” by voting Republican in November. “Get away from the Democrats,” he told them. “Think of it: We have the best numbers in history. . . . I think we’re going to get the African American vote, and it’s true.” He also celebrated hip-hop artist Kanye West’s visit to the Oval Office on Thursday, adding: “What he did was pretty amazing.”
Trump’s speech threatened to reignite a highly divisive debate over America’s racial history with just weeks to go until the midterms. Trump has previously defended statues commemorating Confederate leaders, tweeting last year: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.” Critics say such statues glorify historical advocates of slavery.
Grant was not the only Ohio-native whom Trump deployed as a foil in his interventions on sensitive cultural issues. He also referenced astronaut Neil Armstrong, telling crowds: “He’s the man that planted the flag on the face of the moon. . . . There was no kneeling, there was no nothing, there was no games, boom,” in a reference to NFL athletes kneeling in protest during the national anthem.
Trump was in Lebanon to boost the campaign of Rep. Steve Chabot, the incumbent whose 1st Congressional District encompasses the county and who had distanced himself from the president ahead of the event. “We didn’t ask him to come. . . . He wasn’t my first choice or my second or my third,” he told one newspaper, apparently fearful Trump’s rhetoric could prove costly in the competitive race. On the night, however, Chabot appeared content to revel in the president’s support. “God bless the president. And, I never thought I’d say this, but God bless Kanye West,” he said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Theologian Rob Lee, a descendant of the Confederate general, said he was “disheartened” to hear Trump praise his ancestor.
“Last night I was disheartened to hear Donald Trump, our president, make comments about Robert E. Lee as a great general, as an honorable man,” he said in a video posted to Twitter. “These were far from the truth. Yet again our president is lying and showing us his true colors. He is showing us that he supports an idol of white supremacy and hatred. Robert E. Lee fought for the continued enslavement of black bodies. It was for state’s rights, yes, but it was for states’ rights to own slaves.”
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What an unhinged evil muppet.
Confusing, trading in truth, honor and righteousness for “winning”. So juvenile. So stupid.
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this is one sick individual. And, he’ll get a pass on this one too because not one candidate or official will speak up.
This is just another of hundreds of examples.
Hitler or McVeigh or other dangerous nationalists could be in the White House and the 2018 Grand Old White Mens Party would kiss his ring and support every incendiary racist anti-women anti-science anti-Obama anti anti comment he makes.
They got their tax cuts (profits up – wages flat)
They got their deregulations (cars, coal, safety, consumer protection…)
They got TWO Supreme Court loyalists
They got immigration deportations and internment camps
They got hundreds of conservative (white male) judges who will uphold redistricting, voter suppression tactics,
That’s all they care about no matter how much flip-flopping they do and selling out and ignoring their constituents occurs.
One very very sick individual and every candidate should be forced to answer “Do you agree with him or not?”
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Pathetic, but so true. This oaf is the Republican Party’s standard bearer.
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And the Republican legislators were well warned before the election that should they not stop Trump in his tracks, they would end up as a party run by far right insanity.
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Not one Republican has said in a clear loud voice that Trump is a clear danger to this and other countries. The event near Cincinnati was another theatrical event with lies and inflammatory language Trump loves to use in his campaign to win reelection.
Even the usually reserved Steve Chabot got into the grove:
“God bless the president. And, I never thought I’d say this, but God bless Kanye West.”
My mental escape: C-Span Books, in this case a well-documented account by Dan Kaufman about Wisconsin. He shows how the big money investment in Scott Walker has degraded Wisconsin, with the memorable put down/show down with public employees only one of many signs of serious decline in the state, with environmental degradation of no concern or the decline in reputation of the University of Wisconsin.
The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, Dan Kauffman
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Trump is that puddle of chunky vomit pooled at my feet.
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Trump must have taken Common Core history, which is to say, none.
I welcome him to come to my 8th grade U.S. history class anytime.
BUT, he would have to show respect to me and the class. I expect a lot from my students.
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Threatened Out West: “I expect a lot from my students.” Trump’s father must have donated money for Trump to stay in school. He doesn’t read, doesn’t listen, lies and doesn’t learn. Are you sure you’d want someone like that in your class? Ewww.
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There’s another thing he doesn’t do…face consequences for his actions.
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Even more disturbing than Trump are the hoards of followers cheering his every incendiary remark. His rallies are a look into the past: Germany circa 1937. What is the psychology at work that enables millions of Americans to look up to this miscreant?
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“What is the psychology at work that enables millions of Americans to look up to this miscreant?”
If you really want to know the answer to that WHY question, well, it’s complicated.
But you might want to study it yourself. Here’s a good place to start:
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P.S. There are 25 lectures in the list. Understanding takes time…..
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“Trump’s speech threatened to reignite a highly divisive debate over America’s racial history with just weeks to go until the midterms.”
Which strikes me as the first real point to all of Trump’s moves this election cycle. The republicans know that they need to excite their base. They cannot get factory workers excited with the tariff. The last time an electorate got excited about economics was when William Jennings Bryan gave the cross of gold speech in the democratic convention of 1896. Modern excitement happens when one side or the other creates fear of the other side. Trump is playing to the fears of a disappearing culture. Change is everywhere. His base is covered in the fear of those whose time is passed.
Men do not see history clearly. It appears to them in an invented play of good vs evil. A true picture eludes man like an impressionist painting, reality layered with a fog that obscures. We paint that picture again and again to define our values. When our canvases do not converge, the conflict of our collective past produces the vision of any possible collective future. That vision cannot exist unless it is really a part of a future. But sometimes the death of a past is a violent thing. Too often in history the confrontation of the visions spills over from art to reality. Then we are confronted with times when the people of nations fight against their own interests to achieve some imagined past that never was.
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Who do you believe, Trump or Grant biographer Ron Chernow? also the author of Hamilton, Chernow paints a very different picture …. then again 45 makes up history to fit the audience …. Grant played a crucial role in the freeing of four million Americans who lived under slavery …. Lee was an unrepentant slave owner … who defended the ugliest stain on our nation’s history ….
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I’ve become increasingly convinced that Republicanism, under Donald Trump, has morphed into a religious cult like Scientology or Nxivm or Heaven’s Gate. Why do I think this? Well, the roughly 35 percent of the population that belongs to this cult is completely impervious to reason or evidence. Talking to them is tryng to convince a Heaven’s Gate cultist that Halley’s comet is not a Pelaidian spaceship come to translate them into a new, higher dimension. Conversations with these Trumpeteers almost always go like this:
Typical Conversation One: Climate Change
ME: We should start naming hurricanes after the politicians who deny anthropogenic global warming.
TRUMPETEER: Right. That’s stupid. Like politicians cause the weather.
ME: By burning fossil fuels, we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If you add carbon dioxide to air, and the heat from an external source, the sun, remains the same, the air heats up. A sixth-grade science experiment will show this. Take two bottles full of air, and place a thermometer in each. Add carbon dioxide to one of the bottles. Shine identical heat lamps onto them. The thermometer in the bottle with the carbon dioxide will show a higher temperature.
When you heat up a fluid, like air or water, it moves. Heat is, after all, nothing but molecules moving due to their kinetic energy. It’s easy enough to demonstrate this. Put a pot of water on the stove, turn on the heat, and watch. This is a preschool science experiment.
When the atmosphere and ocean are heated up, they move more, and so we get bigger, more powerful storms of longer duration.
TRUMPETEER: This is not proven. It’s a hoax.
ME: I just explained this to you. This isn’t difficult to understand. Here’s a Sept 2018 NOAA report saying that hurricane strength, frequency, and duration are projected ot increase, because of global warming, by 300% by the year 2100.
TRUMPETEER: Boy, you’ll believe any crazy thing, won’t you?
YUP: Crazy stuff like elementary fluid dynamics, you know, science.
TRUMPETEER: It snowed yesterday here in Montana. Case closed.
Typical Conversation Two: Healthcare
ME: It’s time for us to enact universal, single-payer health insurance.
TRUMPETEER: Ha! The administration just released a report saying that Sanders’s proposal would BANKRUPT the country, that it would cost 10.7 percent of GDP by 2022.
ME: Uh, we’re already paying a lot more than that. According to the latest figures I’ve seen, in 2013, healthcare costs in the United States were 17.1 percent of GDP.
TRUMPETEER: Yeah? Well, under our system, we have the best healthcare.
ME: Of all the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—you know, countries like Canada and Japan and Germany and Denmark and so on—the United States has the highest infant mortality, the lowest longevity, and the highest rates of all the diseases of affluence.
TRUMPTEER: Yeah, but people come here from other countries to be treated.
ME: Yes, rich people do, because we have some of the best treatment facilities that money can buy. But that’s just the point. Many millions of Americans can’t buy these services.In every other advanced country in the world, whether you can be treated is not dependent on how wealthy you are.
TRUMPETEER: Yeah, right. We need a system like they have in Venezuela. That really worked with them.
ME: ALL of the countries in the OECD have some sort of government-provided, universal care system.
TRUMPETEER: That’s Communism.
ME: No. That’s just simple decency, as all the rest of the world EXCEPT the US has figured out.
TRUMPETEER: Death panels!
ME: You can’t call what they have in France or Finland or Japan Death Panels. That’s nonsensical. Again, the OECD countries have BETTER OUTCOMES and spend less than HALF what we do per capita.
TRUMPETEER: Make America Great Again!
ME: That’s what I’m suggesting.
TRUMPETEER: Libtard snowflake idiot.
ME: Sigh.
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R.E. Lee opposed both slavery and secession. But he put his loyalty to Virginia (his “country”), ahead of his loyalty to the union. He was not a “Great General”. His side lost.
President Gerald Ford, restored R. E. Lee’s American citizenship, retroactively, in 1975. I think that was a grand gesture of reconciliation. Part of Abe Lincoln’s “binding up the nation’s wounds”.
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Lee didn’t “oppose slavery.” HE OWNED SLAVES! And quite a few of them. You must have learned history in the same place Trump did.
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Like many slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson, Lee held slavery to be “an evil institution”. see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee
Lee postulated that slaves should eventually be freed. Many slave owners held paradoxical views.
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Yet they went to war, sent their sons and neighbors to war, to preserve slavery
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Make no mistake. The Republican party is the party of white nationalism and white supremacy. And Trump is its “leader.”
The conservative Houston Chronicle warned about Trump in a pre-2016-election editorial, noting that “ Any one of Trump’s less-than-sterling qualities – his erratic temperament, his dodgy business practices, his racism, his Putin-like strongman inclinations and faux-populist demagoguery, his contempt for the rule of law, his ignorance – is enough to be disqualifying.”
But the racist goobers — and there are a lot of them — adore him. These are the same people who watch Fox. They also think Robert E. Lee is an American “hero” who was only defending his home state against Northern “aggression.”
In fact, Lee inherited and then freed his slaves. Actually, the terms of inheritance required that the slaves Lee inherited be freed within five years. Lee kept – and worked – the slaves for the full five years. Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor noted in her award-winning biography of Lee that he was considered “a hard taskmaster…He started hiring slaves to other families, sending them away, and breaking up families that had been together on the estate for generations. The slaves resented him, were terrified they would never be freed, and they lost all respect for him.”
Lee said that all this was necessary: “The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence.”
In other words, slavery is just part of God’s will. There were plenty of people during that era who differed with Lee about that.
Yet he took the side of the secessionists, and he went to war with them. He led the Army of Northern Virginia, the main army of the Confederate States of America.
And all of this raises the question, Why did the Confederate states secede from the Union? The articles of secession in those states explain it well.
South Carolina was the first state to secede. Its “Declaration of Causes” cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.”
The state of Mississippi articles of secession notes that “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world…a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
In Texas, those who wrote declaration of secession said “the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator…”
In Louisiana, secession commissioner George Williamson said “the people of Louisiana… look to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery…people of the slaveholding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.”
In Georgia, declaration of causes for secession said that “The people of Georgia…have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.” On the eve of secession, Georgia’s governor noted that poor whites were not the negro’s equal, stating that “The negro is in no sense of the term his equal. He feels and knows this. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men.”
Alexander Stephens, the Confederate States vice president, laid out the raison d’etre, the defining rationale, of secession:
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
So it’s virtually incomprehensible to say and to believe that Lee opposed both slavery and secession if, in fact, he owned slaves and he sided with secessionists. He did both.
And still, the racists say otherwise. They argue – falsely – that the Confederate flag is their “heritage.” They say Confederate monuments were “part of the healing process after the war.” That monuments to Lee and Stonewall Jackson were part of the “healing process for the entire nation.” They make inane comments like“Do liberals ever read history books?” when their knowledge of American history is abysmally shallow and error-plagued.
In Charlottesville, where the Unite the Right rally drew all kinds of racists, from Confederate sympathizers to KKKers and Neo-Nazis, a local television station (29 News) has become a haven for white supremacist commenters who spew twisted, distorted versions of American history and pro-Trump rhetoric, while purging comments (and commenters) who call them out for what they are. Sad.
But local TV stations are far from the only problem. When The Washington Post reported that Trump had shared “highly classified” intelligence with Russian officials, conservative commenters and media made up excuses. Brit Hume, at Fox, expressed skepticism in the report. Laura Ingraham blamed the story on leaks from “Obama loyalists seeking to stir up drama.” The late Charles Krauthammer said Trump had made an innocent mistake — a “slip up,” and Fox News’ James Rosen said the real problem was The Post, while Fox News Jesse Waters said “Maybe the Russians were the leakers! Trying to make Trump look bad.” And then Fox reran clips about Hillary Clinton’s “emails!!”
Trump is a racist. The Republican party is the party of white supremacy. But they have lots and lots of aiders and abetters.
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First, let me say, that there are some CLASSIC comments on here. Touchè, Bob, and Threatened Out West…. “Trump must have taken Common Core history…..” Ha, ha, ha…..that’s very good. And, quite accurate, too. (I say that as a history teacher.)
This post has it ALL. There’s Lloyd barfing (I guess) while Laura gives us a different way of using our heads (reading what sounds like a good book.)
Yeah…I gotta love you guys. Where would I be without you amidst this dark, dark age we are enduring? And, how to begin when it comes to Trump’s latest diatribe? (Or, to use that wonderful nom de blog, “Wait, What?”)
I went and found a clip of Trump talking Lee on CBS. I had to go to the source, as much as it pains me. . And, the first thing that actually comes up on this particular video is him riffing about how underappreciated President McKinley is….how that long ago president was actually so “smart” in trade and tariffs. What??? McKinley?
What to say that hasn’t been already written about Trump? One of my BIGGEST fears and heartaches (I have to admit) on election night 2016…what immediately hit me big time when the deal went down, was that for the next four years half the world would be parsing and plumbing the depths of idiot Trump’s psyche, devoting billions of words and countess hours to his shallow, angry mind. And, wondering about the people who adore him. (Where the hell are THEY coming from?) And, you know, when you think about Trump, what it always comes back to is that when he is babbling, he is usually talking in reference to HIMSELF. And, now we are, too, as a culture at large. TALKING ABOUT TRUMP, on and on and on….
Trump sees himself as McKinley and Grant and K (he whose name shall not be typed) and Kanye and Lincoln and even some part of Christine Blasey Ford (yes, her). He is whoever he wants to claim to be on our planet at any given moment in time… and reality and history be damned. He defines people and events the way he wants to, in his bizarro brain. And, tragically, Trump’s weirdo, reality show framing of the universe as we are living in it seems to have taken over a significant part of the global consciousness. Not the whole thing, no, but way, way too much.
People are having different reactions to this sad development in human history. Some of us are just bugging out and disconnecting. Hiding, taking up hobbies, binge watching Netflix. Some of us just can’t take it anymore. Or, never even tried. Others seem to be exhibiting the Stockholm Syndrome. (Like, most the G.O.P.) And, sadly, we have those fellow citizens (even friends and family) who are actually rejoicing in this crapfest, exulting and cavorting gleefully in this pool of barf.
There’s the whole panoply of possible human behaviors on display here, some quite troubling. Really, deeply disturbing. (It calls to mind those Medieval mob scenes when a particularly poor wretch was being tortured and burned alive and a pile of villagers showed up to cheer it all on.)
And, then there are those people who continue to endure this MESS being stoic and intelligent and even brave, all the while laboring to make life better for us all. And, even hanging onto a shred of humor whenever possible. I salute you. Of course, the real history lesson here today is that you have saved us time and time again since the year zero. And, hopefully, you will come through now, too.
Ahhhh, human beings and our ever so QUIRKY behaviors. Eventually, the machines might make things pure and so clear and incredibly efficient and simple….that is, if we don’t blow up or melt down the planet first. God help us all, if either scenario plays out.
Meanwhile, carry on, folks. Have a great Sunday. I’m going to stop procrastinating and make out my bills and eat some cereal Let’s hope the “better angels” of our nature eventually win the day.
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It was a figurative barf from the brain, and that was my revised reaction.
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