Donald Trump’s tweets about the loss of artwork in toppling Confederate status rings more than a little false in light of his own history of smashing art.
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To build his skyscraper, Trump first had to knock down the Bonwit Teller building, a luxurious limestone building erected in 1929. The face of the building featured two huge Art Deco friezes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted to preserve. The museum asked Trump to save the sculptures and donate them, and the mogul agreed—as long as the cost of doing so wasn’t too high.
Surprise. Trump didn’t follow through. Not because it would have cost too much, but because he decided taking down the art would delay the project almost two weeks—and he couldn’t have that. Trump later posed as “John Baron,” pretending to be his own PR person to defend crushing some of the most important architectural art in the city.
The actual cost to recover the artwork intact was determined to be $32,000—on a project that cost between $80 and $100 million. Trump simply smashed the friezes into rubble and discarded bronzes the museum had asked him to preserve. That’s Trump’s appreciation for art.
But if Trump doesn’t care about artwork, he does care about Confederate monuments. In fact, there’s one on his Virginia golf course.
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.”
The problem is that the battle Trump memorialized, never happened.
The remainder of the text on the marker describes a major conflict.
“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!”
What do actual historians have to say about Trump’s “River of Blood” monument?
“No. Uh-uh. No way. Nothing like that ever happened there,” said Richard Gillespie, the executive director of the Mosby Heritage Area Association, a historical preservation and education group devoted to an 1,800-square-mile section of the Northern Virginia Piedmont, including the Lowes Island site.
Gillespie was just one of a series of historians that told Trump there had been no battle there. In fact, no historian found any evidence for a battle such as Trump claimed, and one offered to help rewrite the monument’s text to reflect the fact that the area had not seen so much as a large skirmish.
Trump wasn’t having it.
In a phone interview, Mr. Trump called himself a “a big history fan” but deflected, played down and then simply disputed the local historians’ assertions of historical fact.
“That was a prime site for river crossings,” Mr. Trump said. “So, if people are crossing the river, and you happen to be in a civil war, I would say that people were shot — a lot of them.”
Trump doesn’t care about art. Doesn’t care about real history. But it seems he does like to glorify the Confederate cause.
Donald Trump’s golf courses represent hundreds of open, park-like areas, where foreign workers are brought in to tend every blade of grass and Trump refers to the $400,000 a seat membership as “the special people.”
So it seems entirely appropriate that Trump should offer to bring every Confederate statue currently on public land, to his land. He can have Moss Robert on the putting green. Stonewall holding back the rough off the second fairway. And surely there’s a Nathan Bedford Forrest out there to guard the membership desk.
It’s hard to think of where you’d find a greater concentration of Confederate admirers. Maybe John Baron could promote it.