Trump was trying to defend his Charlottesville comments, and ended up making it worse. Now he’s going to have to defend, if he really believes a general who betrayed the United States should be considered “great”.
Bad rabbit hole for him to step into, but at the same time, I am actually going to defend him here. And for me, to defend Trump is a bit of an anomaly.
Obviously, we have to define what the word “great” means.
Trump never said (or perhaps maybe someday) Robert E. Lee was an American hero or a “great man”, but that his general skills were above average. Somebody can be a great piano player for example, and be a rotten person and anti-American. I believe Trump’s generals, whether imaginary or not (I vote for imaginary btw), may have said that his skills during the Mexican-American War made him a great general. But at the same time, would Trump be willing to agree that Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot, and Saddam Hussein were great dictators. That’s obviously a moral and perhaps semantic question.
While I do agree that his statement is technically correct, but it’s not something that most people would consider to be “great”. They assume the word “great” = “hero”. Robert E. Lee was no hero. He betrayed the United States.
I will agree with you there. I am pretty sure, he is going to walk back his comments, because he praises a general who betrayed the United States and killed thousands of Americans.
He is going to have to define what “great” means. If he believes great = hero, then his comments are bad. But if he’s going to consider Mao a great dictator, but a horrible person, then he might be correct.
Calvin, you’re a great poster, but you give him too much credit.
I could see giving him that kind of credit if I thought he had studied the issues of the war, had made himself knowledgeable in the tactics of Lee, had the nuance to be able to separate the work of the general compared to his obvious traitorous acts.
But he’s just a stupid blowhard moron who probably doesn’t know the first thing about the Civil War other than the basic simplicity any 3rd grader knows.
And if your state decided to become a foreign country and attack fellow Americans, you would be all for defending your state, right?
When people say he was defending his state, what they really mean, he was defending Virginia’s right to discriminate against black people and slavery. That’s a hard thing for people to legitimately defend.
What I don’t get is that he says that he has talked to many generals at the White House and then says that many people have said that he was their favorite general. So why the comment about the generals in the WH?
I try to be fair to people and assume the best for everybody. It’s true that he got Andrew Jackson totally wrong. So maybe I shouldn’t assume that Trump can separate “great person” and “great general”.
Still… in 2019, we can easily make a moral decision as to whether or not people who fought to preserve chattel slavery deserve to have a place of honor in our cities and parks.
