Does Donald Trump Own a Civil War Monument for a Fictional Battle on a Golf Course?
Claim: On a golf course owned by President Trump, a monument stands honoring a Civil War battle that never happened.
What's True: In 2015, the New York Times fact checked a Civil War monument on a golf course owned by Donald Trump in Virginia and found it to be historically inaccurate.
What's Undetermined:
Whether any changes to the monument had been made in intervening years.
Origin: President Trump in a May 2017 interview hypothesized that Andrew Jackson could have prevented the Civil War if he had been president at the time, and went on to wonder aloud why the issues leading to the war could not have been “worked out.” Those comments led to renewed interest in a 2015 news item about an historically inaccurate monument on golf course he owns:
On 2 May 2017, Golf Digest republished a 2015 item with a note:
President Donald Trump recently caused a stir with comments about Andrew Jackson and the Civil War. However, this is not Trump’s first case of historical revisionism regarding the Great Rebellion. From 2015[.]
The Golf Digest piece drew largely from a 24 November 2015 New York Times article reporting that after Trump bought the Lowes Island golf course in Virginia in 2009, he added a Civil War monument that later proved historically inaccurate:
Mr. Trump also upgraded [the golf course’s] place in history.
Between the 14th hole and the 15th tee of one of the club’s two courses, Mr. Trump installed a flagpole on a stone pedestal overlooking the Potomac, to which he affixed a plaque purportedly designating “The River of Blood.”
“Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,” the inscription reads. “The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ ”
The inscription, beneath his family crest and above Mr. Trump’s full name, concludes: “It is my great honor to have preserved this important section of the Potomac River!”
Like many of Mr. Trump’s claims, the inscription was evidently not fact-checked.
The article went on to quote several historians and experts who definitively rejected the claim on the plaque. When the Times contacted Trump for a response, he was defensive:
“How would they know that?” Mr. Trump asked when told that local historians had called his plaque a fiction. “Were they there?”
Mr. Trump repeatedly said that “numerous historians” had told him that the golf club site was known as the River of Blood. But he said he did not remember their names.
Then he said the historians had spoken not to him but to “my people.” But he refused to identify any [employees] who might still possess the historians’ names.
“Write your story the way you want to write it,” Mr. Trump said finally, when pressed unsuccessfully for anything that could corroborate his claim. “You don’t have to talk to anybody. It doesn’t make any difference. But many people were shot. It makes sense.”
It was not immediately clear whether the plaque has been altered in the past two years, or if it is still on display at the Trump National Golf Club. We contacted the club for more details, but have not yet received a response.
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The country really needs the 28th Amendment: Presidential Recall.
We're going too far into the Twilight Zone with this guy.
