Seven Bizarre Notions Trump and His Team Have About America

ny times



President Trump, his motley crew of White House and cabinet ideologues, and many other Republicans claim to have a better understanding of American values, traditions and history than the rest of us. They are the “real Americans,” as the historically illiterate Sarah Palin loved to say many times a day.

But a great many of their notions about America are deeply puzzling at best and, at worst, truly scary ideas infused with racism and intolerance of dissent.

The list defies comprehensive accounting. (Time magazine has to keep updating a handy guide to the world according to Trump that it started after his first 100 days in office.) But here are some of my favorites.

The Civil War: Back in August, after racists marched in Charlottesville to defend monuments to those who fought to preserve slavery, Trump’s lawyer, John Dowd, forwarded around an email saying that there was “literally no difference” between George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

More recently, John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, told Laura Ingraham on Fox News that the “lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”

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Andrew Rosenthal
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RECENT COMMENTS

Patricia G 2 hours ago
There's much commentary here about the big compromises in our history and whether the Civil War was about secession or slavery. But,...
DebbieR 3 hours ago
Mr. Rosenthal, it doesn't matter what you, or other elites think about what Trump says, because he is speaking to his base, and only his...
Charles 3 hours ago
Trump is not a political discussion, it's a discussion about psychology. Reporters were taken off guard because they were ready to write...
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What possible compromise could there have been over slavery? But it’s also false history. There were plenty of “compromises.” All of them enshrined the evil institution of slavery and made the civil war more likely, not less.

It might be tempting to write Kelly’s remarks off as the ravings of a man whose boss must drive him crazy on a daily basis and who had earlier talked of a mythical time when women in America were held “sacred” (by blocking their career aspirations and paying them less than men, denying them birth control and access to abortions, and refusing them the right to vote for more than a half-century after the Civil War).

But Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, picked up Kelly’s false history the next day. There was, she said, “pretty strong consensus” among people from “the left, the right, the North and the South” that a failure to compromise caused the war.

Questioning the military: Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, lied on Oct. 19 about a speech given by Representative Frederica Wilson of Florida when he was making his defense of Trump’s conversation with the widow of an American soldier.

Asked about that later, Sanders said, “If you want to go after General Kelly, that’s up to you, but I think if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that’s something highly inappropriate.”