Then-candidate Donald Trump had a starkly different opinion from now-President Trump on how to deal with the remaining emblems of the Confederacy still displayed around the South. Trump, over the last week, has combatively refused to admit his equivocal stance on neo-Nazi demonstrators wasn’t the appropriate way to address the violence in Charlottesville. Instead of admitting he was wrong, Trump proceeded to try to rewrite American history to show that he was, in fact, right the first time in his handling of the crisis. It led the president down the slippery and surreal slope of incrementally endorsing elements of white nationalism to the point where he toed the white supremacist rhetorical line of equating the removal of Confederate symbols as an affront to “our culture” (read: “white culture”).

It has been—and continues to be—a shocking rhetorical and moral unraveling from the president of the United States. Even more so because two years ago Trump was asked about the flying of the Confederate Flag, the most ubiquitous and divisive symbol of the Confederate South. During a June 2015 campaign press conference—his first as a presidential candidate—then-candidate Trump was asked about whether the Confederate flag should be taken down from the South Carolina State House. Trump was asked by a reporter where he stood on the issue, which became a national issue following the mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina six days earlier. “I would take it down, yes,” said Trump then. “I think they should put it in the museum... let it go… respect whatever it is you have to respect because it was a point in time.”