It was to be expected that Fox News’ The Five show would give Donald Trump a pass for botching American history during his July 4th speech but guest host John Rich went the extra propaganda mile by calling the speech “almost like a history lesson.”
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has a good synopsis of Trump's embarrassing mistakes about U.S. history basics:
Instead of saying that the Continental Congress named George Washington commander in chief, which it did, Trump said for some reason that they named it after him, which they didn’t. He said that the winter of Valley Forge, not at Valley Forge, was difficult. Trump claimed that British Gen. Charles Cornwallis of Yorktown had victory snatched away from him instead of saying that Cornwallis lost at Yorktown. He said that the army manned . . . something, instead of presumably saying that American forces manned the ramparts at Fort McHenry. The fort’s ramparts are part of the national anthem, which Trump then alluded to twice more.
That, of course, is not including Trump’s shocking claim that the revolutionary army “took over the airports” more than a century before airplanes existed.
The point of Bump’s column was that the history mistakes were not as significant as Trump’s failure to own up to them and the “vast infrastructure” of sycophants “willing to help him in that effort.”
As if to prove Bump right, enter The Five. Before Rich got to praising Trump’s ignorance of history as some kind of mastery of the subject, liberal cohost Juan Williams had already excused Trump's airport gaffe. “I know a lot of people didn't give Obama the benefit of the doubt when he said -- I think he said 57 states when he was campaigning. But I'm going to give the president the benefit of the doubt,” Williams said, without explaining why Trump would deserve such a thing."
But Rich went a whole lot further:
RICH: And to me it was almost like a history lesson, a refresher course going through every single branch of the military, pointing out great people that did great things. And then here comes the actual hardware. Flying right over the top of the Washington Monument, and you're like wow. I mean, I think for Americans, for me it was a moment of pride to see all of that come together in one moment.
And also, I think around the world, they're watching that going, yeah, they've got a lot of -- America is no joke. And look at how our principles of this country have developed so many incredible Americans. I mean, we invented rock and roll. We invented country music. We invented R and B. We invented the automobile. All the things he started reminding us up -- yes, it reminds you how great our country is and it's great because it's free.
Williams piped up with yet another error. “I think [Trump also] said Alexander Graham Bell, but the Canadians immediately said – Uh, I think he’s a Canadian.” But it was all in Trump-friendly fun and nobody dwelled on it.
Cohost Tammy Bruce moved the conversation right back to focusing on Glorious Leader’s glories.
Watch the Orwellian praise below from the July 5, 2019 The Five.