Under fire – from GOP – Trump digs in on Confederate icons
BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — With prominent Republicans openly questioning his competence and moral leadership, President Donald Trump on Thursday burrowed deeper into the racially charged debate over Confederate memorials and lashed out at members of his own party in the latest controversy to engulf his presidency.
Out of sight, but still online, Trump tweeted his defence of monuments to Confederate icons — bemoaning rising efforts to remove them as an attack on America’s “history and culture.”
And he berated his critics who, with increasingly sharper language, have denounced his initially slow and then ultimately combative comments on the racial violence at a white supremacist rally last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Trump was much quicker Thursday to condemn violence in Barcelona, where more than a dozen people were killed when a van veered onto a sidewalk and sped down a busy pedestrian zone in what authorities called a terror attack.