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Had Donald Trump been mayor of New Orleans, they would probably still be standing, but all he could do was issue tweets from the White House bewailing the removal of our 鈥渂eautiful鈥� Confederate monuments.

The last one to go in May 2017 was the statue of Robert E. Lee, whom Trump last week described as a 鈥済reat general,鈥� albeit only in passing. Trump was speaking at a rally in Ohio, where he had come to praise native son, Lee's allegedly bibulous nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant. But his earlier pronouncements have earned the gratitude of David Duke, so Trump's harangue was inevitably seen in some quarters as an endorsement of the Lost Cause.

Since his chief of staff, John Kelly, a few months ago called Lee an 鈥渉onorable man,鈥� we can probably take it for granted that Frank Stewart and Charles Marsala would have been happier if Trump had been Mayor of New Orleans. They could hardly have been unhappier than they were when failing to stop Mitch Landrieu and the City Council from putting Lee, Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard and the Liberty Monument into storage.

But Landrieu is mayor no longer, and Stewart and Marsala are evidently not yet reconciled to the deConfederalization of the city streets. So they have come up with a plan to build a huge memorial plaza called Victory Circle and make Lee its most prominent honoree.

Confederate apologists have been displaying considerable intellectual dishonesty since they started lionizing Lee et al. in the first place. So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when they propose a memorial centered on the biggest loser in American military history and call it Victory Circle.

The plan is for a plaza around the column that used to support Lee's statue. It would be dedicated to men and women, black and white, who fought in all the wars in which America has been engaged. That is evidently supposed to make Lee's rehabilitation acceptable but is a transparent subterfuge. Lee would get star billing with a series of plaques celebrating his various exploits and the other honorees would be there for what is evidently conceived as politically correct cover.

But everyone knows that Stewart and Marsala liked Lee Circle just the way it was before Landrieu came along. They didn't propose paying tribute to anyone else until they needed a pretext for Lee's return.

Imagine including, say, Andre Cailloux, the black New Orleans native who became the Union hero of the Civil War Battle of Port Hudson. It would be an insult if the impression arose that he was being honored just to make up the numbers.

Stewart and Marsala have obviously put in a lot of work on their Victory Circle project. Atop the 60-foot column where Lee stood, they propose a statue of the Goddess of Victory. At ground level, statues of various distinguished warriors would be erected and gardens planted in honor of historic campaigns.

Evidently, in order to deflect suspicions that the plan is designed to vindicate the case that Lee fought for, a plaque would declare that 鈥淰ictory Circle honors the soldier and does not judge the merits of any war.鈥� Another plaque asserts that the statue removed last year honored not Lee himself but the so-called 鈥淭igers,鈥� the 抖阴h troops who fought under him in Virginia.

That claim does not increase confidence in the Confederate version of history; the apotheosis of Lee was the express intention of the committee that commissioned the statue, unveiled in 1884.

The plan avers that Lee fought in the War for Southern Independence, but at least the authors resisted the temptation to call it the War of Northern Aggression.

That won't be enough to save Victory Circle, however, for it is clearly a diversionary tactic. The real purpose is to smuggle Lee back into a place of honor only 18 months after a great deal of public money was spent on removing him. These guys are whistling Dixie.

Email James Gill at Gill1047@bellsouth.net.