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If you're the kind of person who's dependent on ?? ??using statues and monuments exclusively to help remember the history of America' greatest traitors, then maybe it's time to pick up some different history books. Or some books, period.

But that hasn't deterred our president who, on Thursday morning, fully and unequivocally planted himself on the wrong side of history by declaring—on Twitter, naturally—that it's "foolish" to tear down statues and memorials dedicated to the Confederacy.

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It's not a new stance from Trump. He made similar comments Tuesday during an epically unhinged press conference when remarking on the Robert E. Lee statue that prompted the violence in Charlottesville, as he (actually) said: "You're changing history. You're changing culture."

It's worth noting that he somehow dropped this statement after denouncing the KKK, a hateful organization that wraps itself in the symbols and nostalgia around the Confederacy, wishing for a bygone era in which slavery was legal.

And maybe that's what's most galling about Trump's stance: an inability to understand the history of not just what these statues represent, but that these memorials and statues aren't ancient treasures. They're products of a much more recent history, bent on trying to drown out the great failure of the Confederacy.

A staple of the 20th Century

A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center [PDF] published following the Charleston Church shooting didn't just note the widespread nature of the ways the Confederacy was memorialized—from statues to street names to schools—but the very specific time periods in which these memorials were erected.

The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans and re-segregate society. This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

The second spike began in the early 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists.

By calling for these statues to stay, Trump's endorsing reminders of the Confederacy (and what it stood for) to be reminders that lionize this past rather than memorialize its tragedy, and he further galvanizes the racist sentiment spurring sp many of these memorials to life.

Worse, that SPLC report notes at least 32 Confederate monuments have either been dedicated or rededicated since 2000.

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When the city of New Orleans finally removed several Confederate statues and monuments this spring, Mayor Mitch Landrieu highlighted the revisionist attempt these objects reflected:

The historic record is clear, the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

Sure, efforts to take down statues and reduce the presence of the Confederate flag have been stepped up since the Charleston shootings. But that news has a dark lining, because it's only after horrible incidents of violent murder that leaders in these cities and states moved to take action.

A false equivalency

I'm a native of Alabama—the heart of the Confederacy—so it's personally galling to hear Trump and his administration attempt to co-opt the talking points that were so often regurgitated by the "South will rise again crowd" I grew up with.

It's also extremely disconcerting to hear this kind of rhetoric being given a national platform. In Alabama, I was surrounded by Confederate flags and casual racism throughout childhood and adolescence. I saw this passion not even bubbling under the surface but out in the open.

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They've been waiting for a leader like Trump to embolden them, the fire-starter they've been waiting for to spur them to action. And now that he's embraced their cause, it only legitimizes their wrong-headed beliefs.

Beliefs like the one expressed by Trump lawyer John Dowd, in an email forwarded to the New York Times: “You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington, there literally is no difference between the two men.”

That view doesn't just warp history, it ignores the context of it. Yeah, Lee and Washington were both slave-owners—an indisputable, reprehensible fact. But that's not the grounds to realistically equivocate the man who helped found and form our country, with the man who helped tear it apart (and create wounds that still clearly evident today).

The statues, Mayor Landrieu noted in his speech, "celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for."

The same feelings of terror and fear do not radiate from any memorials to Washington, as flawed a man as he was. Apparently, neither Dowd or Trump trust that the American people are smart enough to understand this complexity of history.

The Southern Perspective

Before he doubled-down on his stance on the Confederate statues, Trump attacked South Carolina Senator, and Republican primary opponent, Lindsay Graham.

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Graham then responded by taking Trump to task for his intent to bend history to his skewed view.

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And here, again, it's worth turning to New Orleans' Mayor Landrieu who said upon that city's Robert E. Lee statue's removal:

This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once. This is however about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division and yes with violence.

Ironically, by pushing for these statues and monuments to stay, Trump's also ignoring the wishes of Lee himself, who famously said after the war that erecting such monuments to the Confederacy would, "in the present condition of the Country, would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its accomplishment; [and] of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour."

Moreover, Lee later wrote that he opposed monuments of any kind related to the war, writing this in response to an invitation to attend a memorial at the fields where the Battle of Gettysburg had been fought:

I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.

In the end, perhaps it's appropriate that it was a fight over a Lee statue in Charlottesville that eventually brought to bare Trump's true feelings. There's no more denying on his part which side he's on, and it's the one that doesn't understand the history of hate that this country has endured. Or, even worse, doesn't want to.