Praising Lee as a brilliant strategist and statesman, Mr. Trump speculated that, “except for Gettysburg,” Lee “would have won the war.” He added: “If only we had Robert E. Lee to command our troops in Afghanistan, that disaster would have ended in a complete and total victory many years ago.” Mr. Trump also called Lee “perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over.”
Lee, whose leadership of Southern forces prolonged the Civil War, has long been held up as a hero of the Lost Cause, which celebrates the pro-slavery Confederacy’s secession from the United States in a conflict that left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead.
Gregory Downs, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, said Lee was not the unifying postwar force that Mr. Trump suggested he was. While Lee accepted defeat, Dr. Downs said, he also actively resisted the terms under which a meaningful reunion could take place and spoke against granting basic rights for Black people. “He is somewhere between an active campaign against a just reconciliation and a passive resistance,” the professor added.
Mr. Trump’s allies have increasingly floated the possibility that he will jump early into the 2024 presidential campaign, though predicting the volatile former president’s moves has always been risky.
This week, Mr. Trump announced that he intended to return to Iowa in October for a rally, visiting a state that presidential hopefuls often frequent given its importance in the early stages of a campaign cycle.