The Trump Administration Keeps Promoting Slop History |
The Trump Administration Keeps Promoting Slop History
America’s semiquincentennial celebration is getting injected with apocrypha and malarkey.
It’s been a puzzling period for formal expressions of patriotic nostalgia. On two separate occasions this week, the federal government publicized false quotations of iconic American presidents, fumbling attempts to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary.
The first instance came on Flag Day, when the Department of Homeland Security’s official X account misattributed the following description of the American flag’s symbolism to George Washington: “We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity, representing our liberty.”
While this quote has been ascribed to Washington, it is evidently apocryphal. He “probably did not craft the quotation,” concludes Quote Investigator, a website dedicated to scrutinizing the origins of quotes circulating online. And the sentiment it expresses is as questionable as the sourcing; Andy Craig of The Unpopulist noted that the lofty meanings the tweet has assigned to different elements of Old Glory have to be a confabulation, as some were not standard at the time of the flag’s adoption.
The next instance was a display of the administration’s historical laziness writ large, literally. As observed by........