Vice President Mike Pence put weight behind President Trump’s assertion that Confederate statues should stay in place Tuesday, by saying the country should simply add more monuments.
‘I’m someone who believes in more monuments, not less monuments,’ Pence said on Fox & Friends. ‘What we have to walk away from is a desire by some to erase parts of our history just in the name of some contemporary political cause,’ he also said.
Pence was referring to white supremacists, including neo-Nazis and members of the KKK, rallying around the idea that statues saluting the South in the Civil War should remain.
Vice President Mike Pence argued on Fox & Friends that the U.S. should simply have more monuments, than remove those that memorialize the South’s role in the Civil War
President Trump sent out three tweets last Thursday morning backing Confederate monuments, which are being taken down in municipalities around the country
The hate groups gathered in Charlottesville earlier this month had said they were there to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
During the gathering a Nazi sympathizer used his car to mow down a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 more.
In the aftermath, President Trump got himself in hot water, politically, by saying the Confederate statues should stay.
‘So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?’ Trump mused during last Tuesday’s Trump Tower press conference. ‘You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?’
Despite receiving criticism for the comments, on Thursday he doubled down.
‘Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!’ he wrote in series of tweets.
‘Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!’ Trump added.
When Fox News Channel’s Ainsley Earhardt asked Pence his view on removing Confederate monuments from the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, the vice president first noted that destroying public property was ‘simply unacceptable.’
‘Communities can have conversations about what displays happen,’ he went on. ‘But I hold the view that it’s important that we remember our past and build on the progress we have made.’
He said the decision to keep or remove statues in the U.S. Capitol should be left up to each state, while the decision to keep or remove monuments in cities or town should be a local decision.
‘What we ought to do is we ought to remember our history, but we also ought to celebrate the progress that we’ve made since that history,’ Pence said.
The vice president recalled waking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a prominent civil rights activist, noting how they had remembered ‘Bloody Sunday’ and the ‘extraordinary progress of the civil rights movement.’
‘I can’t help but think that, rather than pulling down monuments, as some are wont to do, rather than tearing down monuments that have graced our cities all across this country for years, we ought to have been building more monuments,’ Pence said.
‘We ought to be celebrating the men and women who’ve helped our nation move toward a more perfect union and tell the whole story of America,’ the vice president added.