The Battle Of Baggage Claim: Trump Claimed Revolutionary Armies ‘Took Over Airports’

WASHINGTON, D C , UNITED STATES - 2019/07/04: President Donald Trump speaking at the National Mall in Washington, DC during the Independence Day on July 4. (Photo by Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON, D C , UNITED STATES - 2019/07/04: President Donald Trump speaking at the National Mall in Washington, DC during the Independence Day on July 4. (Photo by Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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President Donald Trump ended a baffling line of his Fourth of July speech with the assertion that Revolutionary War armies “took over airports” — which would have been quite a shock to the citizenry of the late-18th century who had not yet invented them.

“Our army manned the amperts, ran the ramparts and took over the airports, it did everything it had to do,” Trump seemed to say. “And at Fort McHenry, under ‘the rocket’s red glare,’ it had nothing but victory. And when dawn came, their star-spangled banner waved defiant.”

In the most charitable explanation of the thoroughly confusing sentence, perhaps Trump was having trouble reading the teleprompter through the steady rain in Washington yesterday, or maybe his speechwriters had a few drinks before sending the final text of the speech.

Either way, we gathered TPM’s historians and mined their collective knowledge — fact check: as there were no planes, there were also no airports in 1775.

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  1. In the most charitable explanation of the thoroughly confusing sentence, perhaps Trump was having trouble reading the teleprompter through the steady rain in Washington yesterday, or maybe his speechwriters had a few drinks before sending the final text of the speech.

    Or maybe the Deep State infiltrated the teleprompter…

  2. Not to mention Fort McHenry wasn’t built until well after the revolutionary war and renowned for its place in the War of 1812. But that would be fact-checking.

  3. Not only no airports, but also no Fort McHenry. That was built later, and the battle there was War of 1812. Our president is a deranged moron.

  4. This is a common misconception. The truth is that early Democrats used horse-drawn airports to transport kids from Comet Ping-Pong to colonial butter-churning events and other treasonous activities funded by a Colonel Soros.

  5. Avatar for tao tao says:

    More evidence. It’s time to move him from assisted living to the closed memory care unit. He can still have thermonuclear capability if it makes him happy.

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