The debunking of Trump’s speech segment about Winston Churchill in WWII has been explored. Never in the field of speech making has so much so wrong in so few words been said.
As the British government advised the British people in the face of World War II, 'Keep calm and carry on.' That's what I did
We have to be calm. We don't want to be crazed lunatics. ... When Hitler was bombing London, Churchill, a great leader, would oftentimes go to a roof in London and speak. And he always spoke with calmness
Well we can dismiss the first part straight away. As the British government web site explains, the “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters were distributed but never posted. They were recalled and recycled in April 1940. The form of words was never a common idiom.
The fact that a design which is now seen to symbolise an era caused so much unease amongst contemporaries remains something of an irony. Yet it was this very unease that ensured the poster would remain hidden from public view until one dusty copy was re-discovered by two booksellers in Alnwick at the turn of the twenty-first century. The rest, as they say, is history.
For most of the last century “carry on” was simply an instruction or army order as in “carry on, sargeant”. In fact that was the title of the first in the series of over 30 movies in the “Carry On….” series that most now associate with the phrase. That 1958 movie paradied the life of National Servicement (army conscripts). They often alluded to popular culture and recent blockbuster movies, e.g. Carry On Cleo, made at the time of the Elizabeth Burton version of “Cleopatra”.
I raise this because I am wondering if Trump watched any of the movies, the 1969 Carry On Camping had a famous scene where Barbar Windsor’s bikini top flew off during morning exercise. So he may have remembered the “carry on” bit and it fixed his false belief that the “Keep Calm” posters were used in wartime.
Rather more interesting in terms of looking at how he is now remembering things, most reputable news outlets have commented that Churchill never broadcast “from the rooftops”. Most of his speeches were made from the BBC’s central London studios or from a studio in his underground War Rooms.
What seems, shamefully, to have been forgotten is that there were broadcasts from the rooftops describing the London blitz. The noted journalist Edward R Murrow’s soundscapes were sent direct to CBS for live broadcasting over their radio network. His calm, dispassionate tone is set against the background sounds of bombing and anti-aircraft guns.
His reports played no small party in changing American’s atitudes to WWII. It’s perfectly possible that Trump has a distant memory of hearing them and conflated Murrow’s calm tone with Churchill’s which at times was pretty forceable.
While the error over the poster is understandable, it seems unlikely that his scriptwriters would have let the “rooftops” bit past. The only conclusion is that it is one of his ramblings constructed from fragments of memory. Trump though professes to admire Churchill, to the extent of displaying a bust of him in the Oval Office. I seriously doubt that he has read or studied much about Churchill apart from what Hitler said in the speeches he keeps by his bedside. There’s certainly something wrong with his wiring.