“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!” President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday. | Alex Brandon/AP Trump: America's culture being 'ripped apart' by removal of Confederate statues

President Donald Trump waded deeper on Thursday into the growing controversy surrounding statues and memorials dedicated to the Confederacy, lamenting online that the nation’s “history and culture” is “being ripped apart” by their removal.

“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can't change history, but you can learn from it,” Trump wrote on Twitter in a three-post flurry Thursday morning. “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!”


Statues honoring prominent Confederates, including Gens. Lee and Jackson, have grown increasingly unpopular in recent years as they have come to be seen by many as symbols honoring slavery, racism and oppression. Defenders of the statues argue that they represent nothing more that Southern heritage and that their removal would amount to a white-washing of history.

The spotlight on Confederate statues has shone even brighter this week in the wake of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacist groups gathered for a rally ostensibly to protest the removal of a statue of Lee. The white supremacist groups quickly clashed with counter-protesters in violence that left one woman dead and dozens more injured.

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Trump, in remarks on the violence, said that blame for it should be shared between the white supremacists and those who had gathered to protest their presence. He said there were “very fine people” in both groups, statements that prompted a swift and nearly unanimous rebuke, not just from Democrats, but from Republicans as well.

Before last weekend’s violence, the removal of such statues has stirred controversy in cities like New Orleans, where Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered an impassioned speech explaining why he supported the relocation of four such monuments away from prominent locations in his city. This week, in the wake of the Charlottesville clashes, protesters in North Carolina ripped down a statue of a Confederate soldier and authorities in Baltimore removed multiple Confederate statues overnight.

The stance adopted Thursday by Trump was stronger than the one he outlined in a press conference two days earlier, when he told reporters that whether or not Confederate statues remain in place should be “up to a local town, community or the federal government, depending on where it is located.”

