Perhaps the most pathetic thing about Trump's fake Civil War battlefield on his golf course....

[MousePlayingDaffodil]

15. I take a certain interest in this . . .

. . . because, as it happens, I live -- "as the crow flies" -- only some 10 kilometers from Lowe's Island/Trump National . . . albeit on the other side of the river, in Maryland.

While the blogger here, Craig Swain, did not specify further what he learned regarding the "local historians" who apparently told Trump what he "wanted to hear" regarding the faux history of the site, I wonder whether there was some conflation going on. Up the river from Lowe's Island, approximately 17 kilometers, there was a fairly small ("small," by later Civil War standards) but bloody engagement known as the Battle of Ball's Bluff.

Fought on October 21, 1861, very early in the war, the battle was essentially a fiasco for the Union Army -- i.e., over 220 killed, another 220 or so wounded, and over 500 captured, compared to 36 Confederates killed and another 117 wounded.

Of possible significance here, it is said that the bodies of a number of the Union dead, who were killed while frantically trying to cross back over the Potomac into Maryland once the rout was on, were not recovered at the site of the battle but, rather, floated down the river -- past Lowe's Island -- some as far as Washington, D.C. That's a pretty grisly image, to be sure, and I've wondered whether that's what gave rise to the "River of Blood" appellation in somebody's colorful (if inaccurate) telling of the alleged significance of the Lowe's Island site.

One can easily imagine Trump, being informed of this vivid, if unrelated, occurrence, "relocating" the incident to his eponymous golf course. It would seem to fit the way he, um, thinks.