Nikki Haley gets fact checked by historian over George Washington tweet

‘It’s hard to know where to begin. It’s 280 characters and a whole lot of errors’

A presidential historian fact-checked former UN ambassador and rumoured 2024 presidential hopeful Nikki Haley after she celebrated President’s Day with a tweet full of inaccuracies about George Washington.

“George Washington turned an army of ragtag troops into an unstoppable force that defeated the British & secured America’s independence,” Ms Haley, one of the many Republicans believed to be vying to be the GOP’s 2024 candidate, wrote on Twitter on Monday. “As President, he oversaw the creation of our Constitution & showed the world what it looks like to govern by the people and for the people.”

According to historian Alexis Coe, who wrote a biography of Washington, most of this is wrong.

“It’s hard to know where to begin,” she told CNN. “It’s 280 characters and a whole lot of errors.”

Namely: the Continental Army wasn’t that strong, and Washington didn’t preside over the writing of the Constitution as president.

“From the very beginning, the Continental Army was not unstoppable,” Ms Coe said. “We know it was almost eight years of fighting the revolution, and the British had the most powerful navy in the entire world. We barely had enough boats.”

Perhaps even more glaring was the constitutional timeline Ms Haley laid out.

“The Constitution created the presidency, and then Washington was of course our first president,” she added.

The Constitutional Convention was in 1787, and Washington didn’t take office until two years later.

The tweets seemed to reference a recent effort from San Francisco to rename 44 public schools, including those named for presidents Washington and Abraham Lincoln, over their ties to slavery and Native American subjugation, which many in conservatives have described as “cancel culture” run amok.

“Washington & Lincoln dedicated their lives to fulfilling America’s promise of justice, liberty, & equality for all,” Ms Haley wrote in another President’s Day message online.  “Instead of canceling them, let’s celebrate their legacies while admitting their faults. Then let’s do what they did & move America closer to its timeless promise.”