With Friends Like These....Donald Trump's New Rip Van Winkle Counterfactual About George Washington

Donald Trump's continuing (if unintentional -- or maybe he's trying to, who knows?) success in giving counterfactual reasoning a bad reputation continued last week, when he flirted with resurrecting and spatially transporting George Washington back to Washington D. C. to make the point that if he, and not Brett Kavanaugh, were being considered for the Supreme Court, the Democrats would unanimously oppose him.

(See the tweet in question):

It's a truism that counterfactuals serve rhetorical purposes, but Trump's remark was not only sloppily conceived (he made no imaginative effort to explain how Democrats might actually bring George Washington back -- a la Rip Van Winkle -- into the present), but no effort to lend the claim any plausibility either.  As if George Washington and Trump's current SCOTUS nominee have anything in common.

Of course, GW might have been known to like beer....