"President Donald Trump: 'Let Them Eat Cake'”
by Ron Unz
Excerpt: "It’s an undeniable fact that many of the most famous or infamous historical quotes are actually incorrect, having been distorted, garbled, or even entirely invented. For example, the former president of General Motors never said “What’s good for GM is good for America.” Voltaire never said “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Mark Twain never said “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” nor did Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson, or Ann Landers.
And this list of famous misquotations certainly includes the alleged words of Queen Marie Antoinette of France. Prior to the outbreak of the 1789 French Revolution, she was said to have dismissed the concern that her desperate French subjects could no longer afford to buy bread by declaring “Let them eat cake.” That cruel utterance supposedly represented the sort of thoughtless arrogance that provoked her beheading a few years later.
However, that remark seems to have been entirely fictitious, possibly fabricated by her revolutionary enemies to discredit her and justify her execution, but more likely invented more than a half-century after her death. As a foreign queen who had been born an Austrian princess, she was unpopular in France for many different reasons. But there seems little if any solid historical evidence that she ever displayed that sort of unusually arrogant behavior towards her subjects, nor even that they had become especially impoverished at the time of the revolutionary outbreak.
Instead, there are some reasonable suspicions that the revolutionary agitation in France had initially been orchestrated by the king’s own cousin Louis Philippe, the enormously wealthy Duc d’Orléans who was one of France’s greatest noblemen, and thereby hoped to dislodge his relative from the throne and seize it for himself. Ironically enough, more than two centuries after those events, that single spurious quote by Marie Antoinette is probably the only thing most Americans today know about her, and perhaps one of the very few things they remember about the French Revolution in which she perished.
The list of such widely circulated historical misquotations is so voluminous that a very long list of these is collected together on an Internet web page, and even that only provides a fraction of the total. In bygone eras, it’s quite possible that even some solidly sourced quotations may have been exaggerated or distorted by those who reported them. Prior to the availability of microphones or cameras, it’s hard to be sure. But unfortunately for the political situation of our current president, those devices do now exist, and based upon an incident a few days ago I suspect that Donald Trump might wish they didn’t.
Trump’s rise to our highest national office was heavily assisted by his notorious willingness to loudly speak his mind on all sorts of issues that most of our timorous political class always avoided, a quality that greatly endeared him to his populist MAGA fanbase. But personal qualities once viewed as endearing can turn damaging if circumstances change.
Trump’s war against Iran has turned out to be much less successful than he had originally hoped, and the resulting loss of oil and other vital resources from the Persian Gulf has already raised American gasoline prices by about 30%, with large additional increases probably still on the way. A few days ago, we learned that our annualized consumer inflation had accelerated to 3.8%, up 1.4 points in just the two months since the beginning of the conflict."
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