It’s been a puzzling period for formal expressions of patriotic nostalgia. On two separate occasions this week, the federal government publicized false quotations of iconic American presidents, fumbling attempts to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary.
The first instance came on Flag Day, when the Department of Homeland Security’s official X account misattributed the following description of the American flag’s symbolism to George Washington: “We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity, representing our liberty.”
While this quote has been ascribed to Washington, it is evidently apocryphal. He “probably did not craft the quotation,” concludes Quote Investigator, a website dedicated to scrutinizing the origins of quotes circulating online. And the sentiment it expresses is as questionable as the sourcing; Andy Craig of The Unpopulist noted that the lofty meanings the tweet has assigned to different elements of Old Glory have to be a confabulation, as some were not standard at the time of the flag’s adoption.
The next instance was a display of the administration’s historical laziness writ large, literally. As observed by journalism professor Steve Herman on Monday and The Washington Post on Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management has unfurled a giant banner bearing a portrait and misquote of Theodore Roosevelt on the facade of its building, which is named for the 26th president. “Courage is not having the strength to go on,” it reads, “it is going on when you don’t have the strength.”
Some online quote repositories—unreliable as they often are—credit the platitude to Roosevelt, or to Napoleon Bonaparte. But a historian who codirects the Theodore Roosevelt Center told the Post “for certain” that the quote “did not originate” from Roosevelt and that it will be added to the center’s list of sayings misattributed to him. An OPM spokesperson shrugged off the error.
These back-to-back slip-ups are somewhat unsurprising coming from an administration regarded by no means as a paragon of truth or factual accuracy. Examples abound of officials getting caught playing fast and loose with quotations. Recall Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s notorious delivery of a prayer that he claimed was based on the Book of Ezekiel, but which actually ripped off a monologue from Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction. Or President Trump’s recent amplification of a ridiculous statement about the Affordable Care Act falsely attributed to Republican Senator John Kennedy.
What stands out about these newest gaffes is the way they exemplify the administration’s embrace of what critics have dubbed “slopaganda” in its public relations approach. Under Trump 2.0, executive branch agencies have abandoned their previously staid social media presences for trollish meme-posting, engagement bait, AI-generated or -manipulated content, and the language and aesthetics of the extremely online far right. With these tactics in effect, the misquotations feel almost quaint. (After all, the erroneous appending of authoritative names like that of Winston Churchill to expressions they never actually uttered is a much-ridiculed staple of online life that long predates today’s feverish digital landscape.) But it is undoubtedly a sign of our slopaganda-soaked times that government agencies exhibit all the fact-checking rigor of a retiree sharing fake Albert Einstein quotes on Facebook.
The misquotes speak to a deeper issue as well: the administration’s treatment of the past not as a subject of serious and objective study, but as something to be wielded instrumentally, often to ideological ends. Such an approach to history is incautious at best—as in the case of the DHS tweet or the OPM banner—and destructive at worst, as is elucidated in a new report by HARPP, the History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project of the Organization of American Historians. The HARPP report documents how the second Trump administration, in its first 18 months, has launched a sweeping “federal assault on history”—dismantling institutions that contribute to the public knowledge of history, censoring facts that cut against the administration’s preferred narratives, and enforcing a biased, ahistorical version of our past.
The report describes, in detail, historical whitewashing, distortion, and erasure under Trump. But one point of focus is the president’s America 250 programming, which is ably characterized as a “pageant of the administration’s self-image and a narrowly celebratory view of the American past” rather than “a moment for national celebration and introspection about the nation’s full history, the promise of the Declaration of Independence, and the progress made and still to be made.”
Among other concerns about the administration’s semiquincentennial commemorations, HARPP cites a proliferation of “inaccurate information, shallow approaches, and superficial perspectives.” The bungled invocations of Washington and Roosevelt are two small but sure new drops in a bucket already brimming with slopaganda. With 250th celebrations underway, and Trump setting himself up to be the chief barker at that particular carnival, it’s a good bet that more fake history and ideological distortions are to come.
