Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tripped overU.S. history when he appeared on Fox News to promote President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair on the National Mall.
The former North Dakota governor was encouraging Americans to enjoy national parks over the Fourth of July weekend, in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
After correctly praising 26th president Theodore Roosevelt for founding several of the parks during his presidency from 1901 to 1909, Burgum then attempted to draw a neat through-line from George Washington to Roosevelt to Trump.
Roosevelt, the secretary informed anchors John Roberts and Sandra Smith, “was president at the 125th [anniversary], so I think, we had Washington at the first, we had TR at the 125th, and we’ve got President Trump at the 250.”
While Washington was America’s first president, he did not take up the role until April 30, 1789, after the Constitution was ratified, so was not in the post in 1776 or during the Revolutionary War.
Instead, the Founding Father was still commander-in-chief of the Continental Army at that time and remained so for a further seven years. Before Washington, America was governed by the Articles of Confederation.
The secretary was also wrong about Roosevelt – it was William McKinley in office on July 4, 1901, when America marked its 125th anniversary.
The former served as his vice president and only stepped up to the presidency himself on September 14 that year following McKinley’s assassination by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
The president himself is no stranger to a historical blunder and committed his own Monday when he posted a picture of a gold bald eagle emblem he appears keen to install on a White House balcony, which he described as: “A Golden Gift to the White House for its 250th Birthday Year!”
Construction of the White House began in 1792 towards the end of Washington’s first term and was completed in 1800.
Perhaps Trump’s greatest historical gaffe came in his first term, however, when he famously proclaimed that the Continental Army “took over the airports” during the Revolutionary War in the middle of a Fourth of July address from the Lincoln Memorial in 2019.
He subsequently blamed the baffling pronouncement on a malfunctioning teleprompter, which had gone “kaput.”
Burgum’s appearance on Fox was doubly embarrassing for the administration as it was conducted live from the parade grounds on the Mall and inadvertently illustrated just how poorly attended the fair has been.
The president headlined an opening night rally at the event – after a number of retro pop acts dropped out of a planned concert – and then claimed it had been “packed to the brim” with 45,000 attendees, despite video evidence undermining his estimate.
He has since claimed that the fair itself, featuring pavilions dedicated to each of the 50 states and a Ferris wheel, has been “packed with happy people,” hoping to counter media coverage suggesting that quite the opposite is true.
