Trump as alt-history buff
Detailing a message-sending mass execution using bullets “dipped ... in pig’s blood,” President Trump approvingly recounted Gen. John J. Pershing’s suppression of Muslim insurgents in the U.S.-occupied Philippines during a rally in South Carolina last year. The story was lurid, dramatic and, as an army of academics and journalists pointed out, completely imaginary. No matter: On Thursday, Trump seized the opportunity presented by a horrific terrorist attack in Spain to recycle the urban legend, urging his Twitter followers to “study” the fictitious Pershing episode, which would presumably involve poring over post-Sept. 11 spam. The president thereby underscored his commitment to what might be called alt-history.
Trump’s alt-historical scholarship is rich and deep. It stretches back to the Founding Fathers, great men like Washington and Jefferson whose stature and contributions to the country are rivaled only by those of Robert E. Lee — which is of course why we honor Washington on the $1 bill, Jefferson on the $2 and Lee on the $3.
Also looming large in the president’s account of U.S. history is Andrew Jackson, in his view a sort of protoTrump who made America even greater. How? By being “really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War.” In fact, Old Hickory’s heroic heading off of the ruinous conflict was hampered only by his inconvenient demise 16 years before it started.
Speaking of the Civil War, why did it happen? Fake historians never ask that question. But Trump has. Moreover, he has had the courage not to answer it with loose talk of slavery or Robert E. Lee — and the magnanimity to recognize the “amazing job” done by Frederick Douglass, not just during the Civil War era but to this very day.
While Trump’s recent failure to convincingly condemn neo-Nazism has some questioning his understanding of 20th century history, his administration has recognized the “victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust” that them systematicallyNazis.a were significant— just Jews not poisonedwho numberalways were by of alt-history,The pinnacle naturally,of Trump’sis his own historic election, with its historic margin of victory and its historic inaugural celebration crowd. Being unconstrained by actual facts, Trump’s althistory can be read as a parable through which he enthusiastically endorses brutality, oppression and ignorance. If those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, Trump, who hasn’t bothered to learn it, appears doomed to repeatedly make it up.