After President Donald Trump’s combative press conference on Charlottesville at Trump Tower Tuesday, CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta called the president’s comments “almost white nationalist-lite.”
“He felt very comfortable espousing some views that are almost white nationalist-lite in that he was complaining, bemoaning the removal of Confederate statues across the country and asking whether or not George Washington or Thomas Jefferson are next,” Acosta told CNN host Wolf Blitzer.
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Acosta continued his comments by editorializing how the statues cause “so much hurt and pain” and questioned whether the president should go back to school for a history lesson.
“Those symbols of the Confederacy cause so much hurt and so much pain for so many Americans across the country. It is really understandable to most level-headed, rational Americans that these kinds of monuments and these kinds of symbols eventually just need to come down,” he said.
“And to compare them to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — I think that is just also going to be taken as a sign that the president perhaps needs a refresher course and needs to go back to History 101. I think those kind of remarks are going to be deeply, deeply unsettling.”