White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt received a quick history lesson on Monday after she made a wild claim about President Donald Trump.
Leavitt said Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend shows he has the “strength” that his predecessors lacked.
“And nobody knows what it means to accomplish peace through strength better than President Trump,” she said during a Fox News interview. “He is the one who came up with that motto, and that foreign policy doctrine, and he successfully implemented it in his first term.”
But Trump isn’t the one who “came up with” the motto. “Peace through strength” has been used in American politics for decades, including by 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and, perhaps most famously, by President Ronald Reagan.
It’s the motto of the USS Ronald Reagan and has made frequent appearances in Republican campaign platforms since Reagan’s time. As a concept, it dates back centuries, as far back as the Roman Empire.
Leavitt’s critics sent her back to school:
