Taking a cue from rival Nikki Haley’s refusal to be honest about the true cause of the Civil War, heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday tried to score some points with the MAGA Republican base by ripping into Dem Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan’s decision to remove a Confederate monument from a city park early that morning, the Washington Examiner reports.

“I’m opposed to taking down statues. The idea that we’re going to just erase history is wrong. You’ve seen it now where they tried to take down Thomas Jefferson. They tried to take down George Washington off schools,” said DeSantis to the crowd in Iowa at an event for his increasingly doomed presidential campaign, of course not specifying who they fuck “they” is or where and when “they tried” to, uh, whatever that sentence-ish string of words about George Washington and schools was supposed to mean. “It just gets so out of hand. So I don’t support taking down statues, particularly if you don’t have legal authority to do it,” DeSantis continued, making it sound like an abuse of power.

It is true that Deegan didn’t seek city council approval to remove the “Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy” statue in Springfield Park. She also didn’t need to, as the crew contracted to take it down were paid not by taxpayers but by anonymous donors and a grant from an area philanthropic organization called the Jesse Ball DuPont Fund. Florida state Senate Republicans responded to the statue’s removal Thursday by proposing a bill “prohibiting certain acts concerning historical monuments and memorials, providing civil penalties for officials who engage in certain actions, providing for suspension or removal of such officials in certain circumstances, etc,” for which Deegan would’ve been fined $1,000 for her order removing the pro-slavery statue.