Republican Convention Offers Apocryphal Quotes Amid Revisionist History

The Republican National Convention has badly needed a fact-checker.

President Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, reminisced Wednesday night about what it was like to grow up in North Carolina before she moved to New York and married the scion of a billionaire. “My seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. B, used to tell us ‘believe none of what you hear, half of what you read and only what you’re there to witness firsthand,’” she said. “The meaning of those words never fully weighed on me until I met my husband and the Trump family.” 

Contrary to her “preconceived notion,” the 37-year-old explained, “they were warm and caring, they were hard workers, and they were down to earth.”

“I often think back to my 24-year-old self, driving alone in my car from North Carolina to New York City, and I think about what I would tell myself now as we head towards the most critical election in modern history,” Lara Trump continued. “This is not just a choice between Republican and Democrat or left and right. This is an election that will decide if we keep America America – or if we head down an uncharted, frightening path towards socialism. Abraham Lincoln once famously said ‘America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.’ While those words were spoken over 150 years ago, never have they been more relevant.”

Lincoln never said this. Historians agree it is an apocryphal quote. Snopes and PolitiFact have traced it to a Facebook meme that went viral last year.

Amazingly, this is not the only fake Lincoln quote that has been cited during this week’s prime-time programming.