History like you’ve never seen
Clips of his Saturday rally in Pennsylvania feature some epic, word-jazz weirdness wherein Donald Trump praised the state’s place in American history. It’s fantastical, but there’s a point to quoting it.
The punctuation is unclear here:
It’s where the army weathered it’s brutal winter at Valley Forge where General George Washington led his men on a daring mission across the Delaware and where our union was saved by the immortal heroes at Gettysburg Gettysburg what an unbelievable battle that was the battle of Gettysburg what an unbelievable I mean it was so much and so interesting and so vicious and horrible and so beautiful and so many different ways it represented such a big portion of the success of this country Gettysburg wow.
Did he mean “Valley Forge where General George Washington led his men” across the Delaware,” or was there a comma in there? Washington crossed the Delaware a year before Valley Forge, but like Bluto and the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor, forget it, he’s rolling.
Mrs. Betty Bowers (America’s Best Christian™) observed, “Donald Trump always talks about history (or, well, anything) like a fourth-grader doing a book report on a book he didn’t read.”
Trump rambled on, again, punctuation unclear:
I go to Gettysburg Pennsylvania to look and to watch and the statement of Robert E. Lee who’s no longer in favor did you ever notice that no longer in favor never fight uphill me boys never fight uphill they were fighting uphill he said wow that was a big mistake he lost his great general and they were fighting never fight uphill me boys but it was too late
Where he came up with this spurious Lee quote is anyone’s guess.
“You know who died at Gettysburg? A bunch of suckers and losers,”probably, tweeted Jennifer Mercieca of Trump’s Gettysburg comments.
Noting the weirdness of Trump’s reference, Newsweek asked the Trump campaign for comment this morning. But Trump’s recitation is not further evidence of his accelerating mental decline (unless confirmation of it), or even a script from “Peabody’s Improbable History.” In fact, this bit is four years old, at least.
Here’s a portion of a transcript from a Minnesota rally on September 18, 2020 in which Trump rants about never fighting uphill and people removing Civil War statues:
But Robert E. Lee won many, many battles in a row and it was supposed to be over in one day. You know, it was supposed to end immediately because the North was too powerful for the South. But it just shows when you have leaders, when you have a great general. And Robert E. Lee, he would have won except for Gettysburg. And that was because his general was killed who’s going to lead Gettysburg. “Never fight uphill, me boys. Never fight uphill.” He heard they were going uphill. “Stop them, stop them.” But we had no cell phones in that day, right, congressmen? No cell phones.
So they sent the horses to stop them, stop them, but it was too late. They fought uphill and they got slaughtered. That’s what happened. But Robert E. Lee, these were incredible things. But I hope you, I hope you appreciate that we had a period of time when they were ripping down all of the statues and monuments. And I said to my people four months ago, I said, “This is crazy. These people.”
They sent horses, huh? And who knew people were tearing down statues of Lincoln and Jefferson and Ghandi? And marching on Washington to topple a Lincoln statue?
And they don’t even know. You know, they started ripping down Abraham Lincoln. When they hit Lincoln I said, “Wait a minute. This is the man. And you can’t do—” Then they hit George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. They hit everybody. They even hit Gandhi. All Gandhi wanted was one thing. Peace. “May we have peace.” Ripped down the statue, “We don’t like it.” I don’t think they have any idea what they’re doing. I think they’re just a bunch of thugs. Okay? You wanna know the truth? I think they are a bunch of thugs. [cheers and applause]
But they were gonna march on Washington and they were gonna rip down a statue of Abraham Lincoln. You know the exact statue. Its up very nicely. Up now. And by the way, they can take them down legally. They go through Congress as a way of doing it. But, you know, they didn’t want to do it that way. And they were marching on Washington. And I said, “Do we have any laws about this?” They said, “No, sir.”
“If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States and added them up, they would not have done near the destruction to our country as Joe Biden and the Biden administration have done. The worst president in history,” said the worst president in history on Saturday.
“We will fight like hell,” Trump exhorted the crowd as he did on Jan. 6. “2024 is our final battle,” etc., etc. against the globalists and communists, “the tyrants and villains who hate our country,” etc., etc.
I sat at my parents’ dinner table in early 2016 and said then Trump was mentally unstable. He’s at least as bad as that and probably worse now. And he’s hoping he’s still got an Animal House full of supporters ready to go out in a blaze of destructive glory for him.
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