Trump Produces a Week of Mixed Messaging as He Tries to Attack Biden

Politics|Trump produces a week of mixed messaging arsenic helium tries to onslaught Biden.

• Sept. 9, 2021, 4:26 p.m. ET

Banished from societal media and deprived of his nationalist platform, erstwhile President Donald J. Trump has been clamoring for attraction and trying to exploit the bid of overseas and home crises that are investigating the Biden administration.

This week has been 1 of his astir frenetic periods yet.

As Mr. Trump seeks to pounce connected President Biden’s handling of the subject withdrawal successful Afghanistan, helium has highlighted the deaths of American work members successful an onslaught astatine the Kabul airport, going truthful acold arsenic to interaction respective household members of those killed, The Washington Post reported.

At the aforesaid time, Mr. Trump undercut his patriotic solemnity with the announcement that helium would walk the evening of the 20th day of the Sept. 11 attacks providing commentary astatine a boxing lucifer astatine the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino successful Hollywood, Fla. (Mr. Trump’s squad has not yet revealed plans to commemorate the day successful immoderate different way.)

And Mr. Trump continued to stoke the country’s radical divisions, issuing an astir ostentatiously provocative connection denouncing the removal connected Wednesday of a towering statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, successful Richmond, Va.

Praising Lee arsenic a superb strategist and statesman, Mr. Trump speculated that, “except for Gettysburg,” Lee “would person won the war.” He added: “If lone we had Robert E. Lee to bid our troops successful Afghanistan, that catastrophe would person ended successful a implicit and full triumph galore years ago.” Mr. Trump besides called Lee “perhaps the top unifying unit aft the warfare was over.”

Lee, whose enactment of Southern forces prolonged the Civil War, has agelong been held up arsenic a leader of the Lost Cause, which celebrates the pro-slavery Confederacy’s secession from the United States successful a struggle that near hundreds of thousands of Americans dead.

Gregory Downs, a prof of past astatine the University of California, Davis, said Lee was not the unifying postwar unit that Mr. Trump suggested helium was. While Lee accepted defeat, Dr. Downs said, helium besides actively resisted the presumption nether which a meaningful reunion could instrumentality spot and spoke against granting basal rights for Black people. “He is determination betwixt an progressive run against a conscionable reconciliation and a passive resistance,” the prof added.

Mr. Trump’s allies person increasingly floated the possibility that helium volition leap aboriginal into the 2024 statesmanlike campaign, though predicting the volatile erstwhile president’s moves has ever been risky.

This week, Mr. Trump announced that helium intended to instrumentality to Iowa successful October for a rally, visiting a authorities that statesmanlike hopefuls often predominant fixed its value successful the aboriginal stages of a run cycle.