NBC is cheated on Trump and Robert E. Lee

Yoni Appelbaum: Take the Confederate statues

"It also gave you a general, which was amazing. He drank a little too much. You know who I'm talking about, right? Asked Trump. The crowd understood that he meant Ulysses S. Grant, even though all assembled reporters did not understand the reference. Trump praised Lee as "a real great fighter and a great general," but even that was at the service of his more general argument – Grant was all the more remarkable as he had vanquished it.

This is not news that Trump thinks Lee was a great general. Lee took his place in Trump's familiar pantheon of military leaders – alongside George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur and Ulysses S. Grant – even before Trump ran for president.

And, as president, Trump did not hesitate to exploit Lee's disputed memory to stir up divisions. It was a violent protest against the withdrawal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville that had given Trump's ambiguity at a press conference in August 2017. He was unable to convict simply the fascists tiki-torch, declaring instead that "there were very good people on both sides". And when a journalist asked him to recognize the difference between Lee and George Washington, he rejected the premise of the question – instead suggesting that if Lee's statue were removed, the statues of Washington and Thomas Jefferson could be the next from. "You change the story, you change the culture," he objected.

Moreover, there is good reason to doubt Trump's understanding of the civil war. He has little understanding of his causes. When discussing the conflict, he tends to reflect the views that prevail in the textbooks of his youth, thus minimizing the role of slavery.

But all this only highlights the significance of the moment. Corey Stewart, former chairman of the Trump campaign in Virginia and now GOP Senate candidate for the Senate in that state, praised Lee as a "hero and honorable man" and made the defense of his statues a central element of his campaign. Until Sunday, there was no reason to think that Trump could distance himself from Lee's praise. In fact, in the 20th century, it would have been hard to imagine a president moving away from Lee's praise.

Adam Serwer: The myth of the kind General Lee

For Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner to win the presidency after Reconstruction, the affection for Lee was deeply personal. Lee visited Augusta, Georgia, when Wilson was 13 years old. All his life, Wilson enjoyed "the wonderful memory of my position, when a boy, for a moment next to General Lee and looking up in the face." After leaving the presidency, he wrote a hagiographic portrait of Lee for The newspaper of the social forces, placing him as a "national hero" who was "in some ways inaccessible in the history of our country".

But it was not just Wilson. Lee has been presented as the embodiment of honor, duty and sacrifice of the South; by turning him into a lion, the presidents defend the cause of reconciliation by section. As Grant said, the cause for which Lee was beaten was "one of the worst for which a people never fought and for which there was the least excuse," rarely been mentioned. The fact that reconciliation was built on a common commitment to white supremacy or, at the very least, to Jim Crow's tacit approval, remained entirely unsaid. And Lee's personal cruelty as a slave owner, so thoroughly detailed by my colleague Adam Serwer, was simply omitted.