Politics

Chris Christie Slams President Trump for Having No Clue About U.S. History

ARE YOU SURE?

In fact, it might be the former New Jersey governor who needs to check his facts.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
Sophie Park/Sophie Park/Getty Images

Former Governor Chris Christie says President Trump needs a history lesson.

“The fact that you would assume that Donald Trump knows any American history is startling to me, Jon,” said Christie, speaking with Jon Stewart on his Weekly podcast show, adding, “‘cos he doesn’t.”

“I’ve known him a lot longer and a lot closer than you have... and Jon, I am telling you, he doesn’t know,” said Christie. “I could give a lot of examples of how he messes up American history.”

To make his case, Christie, who has previously questioned the president’s mental abilities, recounted being shown around the White House by Trump in his first term, where the pair visited the Lincoln Bedroom.

“He pointed to the desk and he said, ‘That’s where Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address,” the famous three-minute speech made by Lincoln to mark the end of the Civil War which changed the nation’s understanding of itself and the Constitution.

“Now, anybody who has read the history of the Gettysburg Address knows, that Lincoln wrote [it] on the train on the way to Gettysburg,” said Christie.

“And I said to the then-president, ‘no, no, no, no, no, it was the Emancipation Proclamation there. He wrote the speech on the way to Gettysburg’,” he said.

“He looked at me, and he said, ‘Chris, you’re really gonna correct me on this? I’m the president and I live here,” causing Stewart to laugh.

Unfortunately for the former governor, President Trump may in fact be better informed about the history of the drafting of the Gettysburg Address.

The idea that Lincoln wrote the brief, 272-word speech at the last minute during the train journey from Washington D.C. to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is almost certainly false.

Journalist Gary Wills thoroughly debunked this “silly but persistent myth” in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.

Lincoln was known to be a thoughtful and slow writer, and Wills cites some evidence that his speech was mainly composed in Washington before he left for Gettysburg.

Although Lincoln may have tweaked the draft in Gettysburg the night before his address, he had weeks to prepare and had even tested out some of the rhetoric in speeches made months earlier.

The governor wasn’t totally wrong, however.

Lincoln did indeed work on the Emancipation Proclamation, the document that freed slaves in Confederate areas, using the desk that now sits in the Lincoln Bedroom.

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