On CNN Wednesday, White House correspondent John Harwood laid into President Donald Trump's refusal to consider removing the names of Confederate officers from U.S. military bases.
"Donald Trump sees every moment as a culture war," said Harwood. "This was precisely the complaint that General Mattis leveled against him last week, that his instincts all run toward division rather than unity to an extreme extent that Jim Mattis said it was un-American."
"We know that throughout his life in particular, racial division has been a consistent theme of his life — sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination, Central Park Five, the Birther racist conspiracy theory about President Obama," said Harwood. "And it's been shot through his entire campaign, what he's had to say about immigrants. The very theme, "Make America Great Again," is a backward-looking theme that views social change through the prism of political correctness and wants to go back to the way things were."
"So even though the military has got a lot of interest in this moment, highly diverse U.S. military, successfully integrated, a racially integrated U.S. military, racing ahead with things like considering changes to those military bases named after Confederate generals, the president says no," said Harwood. "Which is why the idea of him giving a unity speech is not likely to produce anything that matters very much."
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