Donald Trump held a Holocaust remembrance service today in Washington, D.C., something that seems like a respectable thing for a president to do, especially when his press secretary just called concentration camps “Holocaust centers.”
In his speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s National Days Of Remembrance, Trump said he was “deeply moved to stand beside people who survived history’s darkest hour” and said that his administration will actively “confront anti-Semitism.” He also completely mispronounced the word “Nazis,” because even something as easy as pronouncing a common word correctly can never be taken for granted when you’re talking about Donald Trump.
Viewers seized on this gaffe with the force of a thousand rabid dogs, picking apart the leader of the free world’s misstep with gusto.
The Trump administration’s Holocaust gaffes didn’t stop there, though. In a proclamation released Monday in remembrance of the genocide, the administration appears to crib liberally from the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website. While the White House’s release says, “The Holocaust was the state-sponsored systematic persecution and attempted annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazi regime and its collaborators,” the Museum’s intro page says, “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.”
When confronted about the seeming plagiarism, the White House said that the State Department’s Holocaust desk consulted with the museum on the wording in an attempt to “respect the museum’s position as the respected voice on this.” You can decide whether or not to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, but the Trump administration does not have the best track record with plagiarism, fact-checking, spelling, accuracy, or the truth.