Republican political operative and Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton appeared on yesterday’s episode of the “Hagee Hotline,” where he said that those who are declaring that Donald Trump is not their president are “ignorant” of how our political system operates.
Barton, who stated that he has been in Washington, D.C., several times in recent weeks to meet with Republican leaders in Congress and to even lead “a training for one of the Cabinet level departments,” said that he saw lots of “Donald Trump Is Not My President” signs during protests around the inauguration.
Those signs, Barton said, “are based on four fallacies that we wrongly teach in education.”
“Number one, those people thought that the popular vote wins,” Barton said. “That’s not the way it is. Number two, they thought that we’re a democracy, not a republic and that’s not true at all. Number three, they don’t understand what it means to be bicameral or what federalism is. So just carrying a sign like that says you’re really ignorant, not of Trump, of our form of government, of our history of who we are. And it is that kind of ignorance that has been generated by our educational system that creates much of the divide that you have in America.”
Of course, people who assert that Donald Trump is not their president do not mean that literally but are rather simply declaring their opposition to his administration on the grounds that he and his agenda do not represent their values. It is a figure of speech and the only person who is ignorant here is Barton, who apparently doesn’t understand how rhetoric works.
