A history professor at Rice University warned that President Trump’s consideration of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as a site for his acceptance of the Republican nomination sends all the wrong messages.
“It’s all a bit nutty,” said Douglas Brinkley, an author and a chairman in humanities at the school. “I mean, here is Donald Trump defending Confederate monuments staying up, refusing to strip the name of rogue traitors like Bragg from federal forts, now talking about speaking at Gettysburg. Remember, not giving a speech there about public policy, but self-aggrandizing himself, making that the center of the Republican National Committee, the middle of the battlefield and cemetery at Gettysburg. I can’t think of a worse idea.”
Trump told reporters during a briefing on Monday that he will accept the nomination either at the White House or Gettysburg, the site of the Civil War’s bloodiest battle seen as the turning point in the conflict.
Some government ethics watchdogs have said that such a display could run afoul of the law.
“Applicable law does provide a variety of technical exemptions, which a clever lawyer might stitch together to claim that this is permissible,” Norman Eisen, once an ethics chief for President Barack Obama, told the New York Times. “But those loopholes do not contemplate an event of this highly partisan nature of this scope and scale and the forced political labor of the hundreds, if not thousands, of federal personnel.”
“It’s a national historic site,” Trump said. “It’s incredible. It’s the history. It’s incredible, actually, to me. And it was a very important place and is a very important place in our country.”
During the discussion with Brinkley, CNN anchor Erica Hill said a speech at Gettysburg by Trump would hearken back to the remarks he gave in Normandy, France, on the anniversary of D-Day, a speech many critics deemed inappropriately political.
“That really struck a chord with a number of people as well because it became so politicized,” Hill said. “To think that now we’re looking at Gettysburg, where the president has in recent weeks really taken it upon himself to do his best to shore up the Confederacy, right? That we keep Confederate flags and monuments to Confederate generals going. That, too, leaves you scratching your head.”
The 2020 Republican National Convention was originally slated to take place later this month in Charlotte, North Carolina, before plans were made to move it to Jacksonville, Florida.
The RNC was forced to scrap both of those contingencies due to coronavirus concerns.
“I think the president is going to lay out for the American people just what he’s going to do to continue the prosperity that he started in his first term,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said last week. “I mean, it didn’t just come that we had record low unemployment and 7 million jobs were created. It was because of deregulation. It was because of tax cuts. It was because of sound policy, better trade deals, energy independence, and there’s more of that to come.”
