Trump says he’d be ‘OK’ with confederate statue of Robert E. Lee while previewing ‘Arch de Trump’ in DC

Trump has long been a supporter of Confederate statues and has criticized the removal and renaming of statues in honor of the Confederacy.

While previewing a proposed construction of a Paris-style arch in Washington, D.C., supposedly in his honor ahead of the United States’s 250th anniversary, President Donald Trump also gave a nod to Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

On Wednesday, Trump previewed the architectural design for an arch, similarly structured as the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, and the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Brooklyn, New York.

Though these arches were erected to honor soldiers who fought and died in the French Revolution and the U.S. Union Army, respectively, President Trump has indicated that the proposed arch in Washington, D.C., will be built to honor him.

When CBS White House reporter Ed O’Keefe asked Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday who the arch was for, Trump replied, “Me.”

“It’s going to be beautiful,” the president said of the arch, which has been coined by some as the “Arch of Trump.”

Trump shared prototypes of the arch with reporters and a group of donors whom the White House hosted for a dinner on Wednesday evening. The donors are helping to fund Trump’s project to build a $200 million ballroom on White House grounds.

Speaking of the proposed arch, Trump told the donors, according to a White House pool report, “Every time somebody rides over that beautiful bridge to the Lincoln Memorial, they literally say something is supposed to be here. We have versions of it… This is a mockup.”

Trump is considering placing the arch between the Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial near the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Trump noted that, in 1902, a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee was considered for the location.

“[It] would have been OK with me—would’ve been OK with a lot of the people in this room,” Trump said.

Robert E. Lee was a general for the Confederate Army during the Civil War, which fought to preserve slavery in the United States. He held hundreds of enslaved Black Americans in captivity.

Trump has long been a supporter of Confederate statues and military bases and has criticized the removal and renaming of them in honor of the Confederacy.

As Cassandra Douglass of the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, Confederate statues and other symbols were used to “remind Black people exactly who was in charge — and to glorify the people who fought to keep us enslaved.”

SPLC’s “Whose Heritage?” report has documented over 2,000 Confederate symbols across the U.S., including outside courthouses, in schoolyards and public squares. The organization notes, “They often appeared in places with a history of racial violence, including lynchings.”

Since returning to the White House, Trump has moved to rename several military bases after Confederate leaders–including at least one named after a Ku Klux Klan member–following previous actions to rename them.

Trump, who described the removal of Confederate monuments and symbols as too “woke,” said in June, “That’s never going to be happening again.”