Bunker Boy and Biden address the politics of monuments, and Biden's is actually worth listening to

Bunker Boy read a maudlin speech at Mount Rushmore yesterday whose text obviously bored him to death except during the sentences inciting his elderly white core constituency against the scary black demonstrators. It's always mildly entertaining to hear him recite names of people he mostly couldn't identify if asked during a press conference or ordinary conversation.

NBC News has a YouTube of its live coverage, Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore event, with his speech beginning just after 1:15:00. Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore event:

Although the removing-statues moment is almost exclusively about monuments to the Confederacy, Trump praised statues of Washington and Jefferson in a bored tone. He didn't even allude to the, uh, special character of Confederate monuments.

Status Quo Joe did address the Confederate monument issue, as Eddy Rodriguez reports in Biden Says We Should 'Protect' Columbus, Washington and Jefferson Statues Newsweek 03/30/2020.

The monument protests come up at two different points in this video, just after 33:30 and 1:01:00. Biden delivers remarks on the Trump's response to the coronavirus Washington Post 06/30/2020:

SQJ managed to make a decent point about monument symbolism. Although he wouldn't be himself if he didn't manage to garble the message a bit. Still, he does make the point that Confederate symbolism stands for white racism and treason and people generally understand that's what it stands for, despite the Sons of Confederate Veterans types babbling about Heritage and their sacred honuh of their great-great-great-grandpappies.

Without explicitly offering advice to protesters, he actually managed to sound like he was giving a sympathetic suggestion to protesters to keep their focus on Confederate monuments and not blur the message by making issues of those whose symbolism is not so clearly identified by the general public. When pressed on the unauthorized removal of Confederate statues, Biden understandably expressed a preference for normal procedures, citing the Mississippi Legislature's recent decision to dump the Confederate-themed official state flag:

But I can understand, I can understand the anger and anguish that people feel by having for years and years, then under the statue  of Robert E. Lee, who, if you're an African-American. So, it's a difference. It's always better to do it peacefully. But there's a distinction between, in, those monuments, and - I shift responsibility and I'm not, I think,  the elected officials where those statues are have a responsibility to move. Put them in museums. Get them down.

But don't expect, if you have sittin' in front of you all these years, and we finally, finally, are going through another phase of maybe responding to the systemic racism in America, and what's we seen happen is, don't be surprised if someone pulls down the statue of Jefferson Davis. It's better that they do not. But it's fundamentally different than pulling down the statue, or going into the Lincoln Memorial and tryin' to pull, you know, a - not Lincoln Memorial, that's a bad example - the Jefferson Memorial, and grabbing Jefferson off his chair. [my emphasis]

That is not nearly so clear for most other public monument themes. I'd be happy to help someone pull down a Grover Cleveland statue. But good luck trying to explain the symbolism of that in a 15-second TV report. Hint: Cleveland's explicitly expressed philosophy of government was, "though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."