House Majority Whip James Clyburn on Sunday said he found it “kind of interesting” that President Donald Trump had celebrated Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as a “great general” given that Lee was, in reality, “a loser.”
Trump recently defended Lee as a way of excusing his comment following the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the rally.
Clyburn wasn’t having it.
“I think he’s expressing what’ts in his heart,” he said of Trump. “The fact of the matter is, Robert E. Lee was a great tactician, was not a great person. Robert E. Lee was a slave owner and a brutal slave master. Thankfully he lost that war.”
The majority whip continued: “I find it kind of interesting that the President is now glorifying a loser. He always said that he hated losers. Robert E. Lee was a loser and even if you could get beyond that, at the end of the Civil War, Robert E. Lee asked all of his comrades to lay down their guns and to furl those confederate flags, and if my memory serves, and put them in your attics, so if the President is going to glorify Robert E. Lee, let’s at least be consistent about it.”
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC): "The President is now glorifying a loser. He always said that he hated losers. Robert E. Lee was a loser." pic.twitter.com/mbYPlosOTr
— Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) April 28, 2019
