Melania Trump claps back at lying historian over her enchanting Rose Garden renovation

Former First Lady Melania Trump called out a dishonest White House historian after he made shady remarks about the Rose Garden renovation she oversaw as First Lady.

Michael Beschloss, author and presidential historian, tweeted an insulting comment about Melania Trump’s renovation of the famous Rose Garden behind the Oval Office. “Evisceration of White House Rose Garden was completed a year ago this month, and here was the grim result—decades of American history made to disappear,” Beschloss tweeted along with a picture.

The picture he included was apparently one taken immediately after the renovation last August when the roses had just been planted and had yet to reveal their true potential.

Melania Trump’s people clapped back at Beschloss with a more recent picture of the garden in full bloom. The tweet blasted the historian for being misleading and dishonest. “@BeschlossDC has proven his ignorance by showing a picture of the Rose Garden in its infancy. The Rose Garden is graced with a healthy & colorful blossoming of roses. His misleading information is dishonorable & he should never be trusted as a professional historian,” the response read from the Office of Melania Trump Twitter account.

Beschloss is not the only unscrupulous person to be using the old picture of the freshly renovated garden. A petition on Change.org has been created in hopes that Jill Biden will undo the renovation and return the look of the Rose Garden to the days of Jackie Kennedy. The same picture used in Beschloss’s tweet is used in the “Then-Now” comparison collage of the garden on the petition’s website. That photo shows the garden covered in tulips, which only bloom for a brief period of time in early Spring. It was shared dozens of times by verified liberals on Twitter, who apparently don’t know much about flowers.

The petition tells a story of the Kennedy’s creating the famed garden after a trip to Europe. The petition claims the Kennedys realized that the White House was lacking anything comparable to the European gardens, and they wanted to fix that. The petition falsely insinuates the garden had not been touched since the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies.

“In 2019, Melania Trump had the cherry trees, a gift from Japan, removed as well as the rest of the foliage and replaced with a boring tribute to herself. Jackie’s legacy was ripped away from Americans who remembered all that the Kennedy’s meant to us,” the petition states.

However, this narrative that has been shared time and again in media and on social networks has been fact checked and debunked. Reuters published the truth of the garden and its maintenance throughout the years and various administrations.

“Tens of thousands of social media users have published posts claiming that in her redesign of the White House’s Rose Garden, First Lady Melania Trump has removed roses from every First Lady since 1913, including Jaqueline Kennedy’s crab apple trees. This claim is false,” Reuters reports.

The report goes on to share that the trees and many of the roses planted in 1962, during the Kennedy administration, have been replaced many times over the years according to the White House Landscape Report. Also according to garden historian Marta McDowell, “In 1962, the construction of the Kennedy rose garden took the site down to the dirt.  Since then, most administrations have changed out some of the roses—hybrid tea and floribunda roses don’t always thrive, especially in D.C. humidity.” So the reports and claims that the changes Melania Trump has made are unprecedented are categorically false.

Reuters further notes that the infamous trees that people have claimed Melania Trump has torn out have simply been relocated for care and will be put back at a later date. When the renovation first took place last year, Kate Bennet of CNN reported in a tweet that the trees’ removal was temporary. “Notably absent from updated Rose Garden are the ten crabapple trees – five per side – that were part of the original 1962 design. The trees, I am told, were removed to the off-campus White House gardening center for care. They will eventually be replanted on the WH grounds,” she tweeted.