WAIT! Donald Trump Is To Give A Speech Near the Site Of A Civil War Battle He Made Up?

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Next week, Donald Trump announced that he was going to give major campaign speech and had selected the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, as the venue.

The event planning then played out in front of reporters.

“I don’t even know where yet. I think we are gonna do it in Washington at the club,” Trump said about delivering the speech at Trump National Golf Course in suburban Virginia. “Let’s do it at the club,” he said, turning to Hope Hicks, his top press aide. “I wouldn’t mind doing it on the Potomac.”

“I almost would love to do it right at the flag,” Trump said.

Please tell me he means this flag: pic.twitter.com/qlMIsgCGSw

— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) June 8, 2016

Now to the New York Times:

When Donald J. Trump bought a fixer-upper golf club on Lowes Island here for $13 million in 2009, he poured millions more into reconfiguring its two courses. He angered conservationists by chopping down more than 400 trees to open up views of the Potomac River. And he shocked no one by renaming the club after himself.

But that wasn’t enough. Mr. Trump also upgraded its place in history.

Between the 14th hole and the 15th tee of one of the club’s two courses, Mr. Trump installed a flagpole on a stone pedestal overlooking the Potomac, to which he affixed a plaque purportedly designating “The River of Blood.”

“Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,” the inscription reads. “The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ ”

The inscription, beneath his family crest and above Mr. Trump’s full name, concludes: “It is my great honor to have preserved this important section of the Potomac River!”

When challenged on the historical veracity of a marker for a heretofore unheard of even in an equally obscure and undocumented war, this is what happened:

“That was a prime site for river crossings,” Mr. Trump said. “So, if people are crossing the river, and you happen to be in a civil war, I would say that people were shot — a lot of them.”

The club does indeed lie a stone’s throw from Rowser’s Ford, where, as an official historical marker notes, Gen. J. E. B. Stuart led 5,000 Confederate troops including cavalry across the Potomac en route to the Battle of Gettysburg.

But no one died in that crossing, historians said, or in any other notable Civil War engagement on the spot.

“How would they know that?” Mr. Trump asked when told that local historians had called his plaque a fiction. “Were they there?”

Actually, Rowser’s Ford is at Lock 23 boat ramp on the C&O Canal (see the red line on the map) and it is nearly a mile from the marker in question and not the scene of any battle.