Abraham Lincoln spoke for around two minutes. It took Trump less than
one to deliver a speech about Gettysburg that should go down in history
as one of the most ridiculous, incoherent, and ignorant statements ever
mouthed by anyone on a public stage.
By Mark Sumner for Daily Kos
Daily Kos Staff
On Saturday, Donald Trump held a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania. This was his last big media event before appearing in a New York courtroom on Monday at the start of his first criminal trial for falsifying business records related to hush money payments to a porn star. So it’s only appropriate that Trump was determined to make his speech especially historic. And he succeeded.
When Abraham Lincoln dedicated the national cemetery at Gettysburg, his delivery was so unexpectedly brief that the photographer sent to capture the event didn’t manage to grab an image from the speech. But Trump, who has repeatedly claimed to be better than Lincoln, aced the 16th president out.
Lincoln spoke for around two minutes. It took Trump less than one to deliver a speech about Gettysburg that should go down in history as one of the most ridiculous, incoherent, and ignorant statements ever mouthed by anyone on a public stage.
Trump started by noting that Pennsylvania was the location of Valley Forge and talking about George Washington crossing the Delaware, which Trump might recall because of this ludicrous painting. Then, skipping over Washington’s capture of the airports, Trump jumped straight to Gettysburg.
That’s when he gave his best rendition of a sixth grader delivering an oral report on a book he failed to read.
TRUMP: Gettysburg, wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look, and to watch, and, uh, the statement of Robert Lee—who's no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor—”Never fight uphill, me boys. Never fight uphill.”
Not only does this speech contain what has to be Pennsylvania’s new state motto—“Gettysburg, wow!”—it also features Robert E. Lee as the apparent founder of Talk Like a Pirate Day, with a bonus dollop of love for the head of the Confederate forces.
It’s amazing just how much Trump packs into a 50-second speech. Trump praises the immortal heroes who defended the Union without naming a single one of them then goes straight into complaining about the level of respect given to the guy who was trying to kill them. At one point, Trump says that Lee “lost his great general” at Gettysburg. This could mean that Trump thinks George Pickett died in his infamous charge (he didn’t) or that “Stonewall” Jackson died at Gettysburg (he didn’t). But really, that seems like such a minor thing in this whole mess.
Trump also neglects to mention that Lee’s expedition that ended in the Battle of Gettysburg was an enormous slave raid in which Lee instructed his troops to capture every Black person they saw and set up a system for taking captives back to the South. But you can’t get everything into 50 seconds.
TRUMP: What an unbelievable, I mean it was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious, and so horrible—and so beautiful in so many ways.
The only thing more amazing than Trump’s Gettysburg address may be how PBS, The Associated Press, The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post all managed to cover Trump’s rally without mentioning one word of this historic statement. Because the national media covering Trump without telling Americans how disjointed and nonsensical his statements are is not historical—it’s what they do every day.
Had President Joe Biden said anything half so irrational, every one of those same outlets would have dedicated their full front pages to a discussion of Biden’s mental fitness. But then, as the corporate owners of media outlets everywhere say, “We need to preserve the horse race, me boys. We need to preserve the horse race.”
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