Robert E. Lee killed more Americans than Hitler. More than Khruschev. More than King George III, Ho Chi Mihn, or Kim Il Sung. He killed more Americans than we’ve lost in every war since the American Revolution, combined. He was the largest mass murderer of Americans in our nation’s history.

General Lee was not a good man: He was a morbidly rich oligarch who not only bought and sold enslaved human beings but delighted in whipping and torturing them.

Three of the 200-plus enslaved people he held at his plantation—Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and their cousin George Parks—escaped and were captured in nearby Maryland. The report in the March 26, 1866 edition of The New York Daily Tribune, quoting Wesley Norris at length, tells us all about Lee’s proclivities:

Fearing President Abraham Lincoln might end slavery in America, Lee raised an army and tried to use it to end democracy in the United States; he thus committed treason in a way that exceeded even Benedict Arnold’s wildest fantasies. His war killed almost 750,000 men, women, and children, all Americans.

No American has ever betrayed or visited as much violence on this country as severely as did Robert E. Lee.

And so, when Lee lost the war that he’d started against us, the federal government seized his slave plantation and turned it into a cemetery for the Civil War dead. It’s today named Arlington National Cemetery.

So, perhaps it makes perfect sense that the current chief betrayer of the ideals of our nation, convicted felon and Putin toady Donald Trump, would brag to a group of American soldiers that he’s going to rename a military base after Robert E. Lee.

Even more shocking, in what’s an astonishing indictment of how our educational system has deemphasized civics in the years since Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both took an axe to civics education, the assembled soldiers cheered the news that Lee’s name would again desecrate a military facility.

Trump then went on to repeatedly lie to our soldiers, falsely claiming that:

And even more disgusting than that, Trump was nakedly using those soldiers he was lying to as political props to massage his own ego and provide a made-for-Fox-“News” clip, as Military.com pointed out yesterday:

This is the exact opposite of the instructions to keep the military nonpartisan that President George Washington gave future generations in his farewell address:

That the Secretary of Defense, “Kegger” Pete Hegseth, would not just allow but intentionally facilitate such an offensive display of partisanship is particularly troubling when compared to........

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