On Tuesday afternoon, the White House shared a meme that has many scratching their heads. According to some, the post suggests that the White House fundamentally doesn’t understand what the National Anthem is about.
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Around 4pm, the White House account posted an image of the painting “Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776” by American painter Jean Leon Gerome Ferris. It portrays a trio of Founding Fathers laboring on the document, over which someone has applied the stanza “what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.” While the original painting is in a lighter tone of daylight, someone has increased the contrast on the post image to give it a sense that the sun is setting. “Moments that define America,” the post declares. “A nation built on freedom.”
“Don’t know why I’m bothering to point this out,” responded longtime Republican insider Bill Kristol, “but the ‘twilight’s last gleaming, or for that matter the dawn’s early light,’ don’t refer to Philadelphia in 1776.”
As one poster noted, “Does anyone want to tell Trump that the star spangled banner was written long after the signing of the declaration and was about the war of 1812, not the revolutionary war?”
Or as another put it more concisely, “Don’t think those words are in the declaration, ya dunces.”
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While there is a humorous element to the White House’s social media slip, it’s also evocative of the “ahistorical” nature of President Donald Trump’s administration. Speaking on Monday, renowned American documentarian Ken Burns argued that the Founding Fathers “would be stunned by someone who seems completely ahistorical, completely disinterested in learning. And I think that would be shocking to them. They would be upset at the brazen self-promotion that takes place daily.” According to Burns, Trump and his allies aren’t interested in celebrating history, but would rather see it “abbreviated” to suit their ideological agenda.
Trump and the wider MAGA movement have displayed this desire to reshape historical narrative in a variety of ways, from seizing control of the country’s top history museum — the Smithsonian — to strictly controlling school reading lists and adding the Bible to curricula, and more. And while the administration has attempted to draw parallels between Trump and George Washington by hanging massive banners of their faces side-by-side on government buildings, some have suggested that the president aspires to follow in the footsteps of a very different kind of historical leader.
For example, in the recent tell-all book Regime Change, it was revealed that Trump is obsessed with comparing himself to some of history’s most notorious mass killers, such as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Adolf Hitler. According to the book, Trump once showed the authors a document explaining why he is more powerful than these and other genocidal figures. The document was written not by a historian, but by his friend’s golf caddy.
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