Donald Trump hosted the World Series Champion Boston Red Sox at the White House on Thursday. Well, some of the team. Many of the people of color instrumental in Boston’s triumph did not attend, including American League MVP Mookie Betts and David Price. Price was among those critical of his own teammates, many of them not people of color, who decided to attend despite the public refusals from other members of the organization.
Red Sox manager Alex Cora, for example, skipped the ceremony and publicly said he couldn’t attend given the way hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico have been handled by the Trump administration. As USA Today notes, Trump incorrectly said during the ceremony that he gave $91 billion in aid to the US territory, a number that PolitiFact says is more like $11 billion.
But putting aside the apparent racial divide among the Red Sox and the team’s insistence that a visit to the White House is “apolitical,” there was another considerable inaccuracy that came to light on Thursday.
Apparently part of the team’s visit to the White House included a presidential tour of the Lincoln Bedroom, where Trump shared a fairly shocking and inaccurate story about the 16th president of the United States.
https://twitter.com/elainaplott/status/1126603320020361217
As many pointed out, this story seems to imply that Trump said Lincoln and, by extension, the Union lost the Civil War or that Werner thinks that, too. Or possibly both.
https://twitter.com/elainaplott/status/1126604156440141824
There’s a lot to break down here if Trump really thinks Lincoln lost the war, the most obvious problem being that Lincoln was assassinated by someone who sympathized with the Confederates, who lost the Civil War. As is often the case with Trump anecdotes, you can take whatever you’d like out of the story he tells and the point he’s trying to make.
Which is why Werner apparently clarifies later that he thought Trump was implying the Union made a comeback and didn’t actually, you know, lose the war.
Werner went on to say he believed the president meant Lincoln was losing the Civil War at one point but then came back to win it.
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) May 9, 2019
Perhaps this is simply wishful thinking from Trump, or a misremembered story from a member of the Red Sox. But either way it wasn’t the only flub by Trump’s White House on Thursday, as the organization couldn’t even get the team’s name right. It also said the baseball team had won the World Cup. Close enough.
