George Washington chopping down his father’s cherry tree may have been a myth, but it is all too tragically true that Trump just recklessly and likely illegally chopped down the oldest grove of cherry blossom trees in DC.

A national treasure,  these sixty trees, a gift from Japan in 1912, are now bulldozed over for a damn golf course. Yet another part of our collective memory destroyed by Trump.

Detail of Grant Woods’s 1939 painting “Parson Weems Fable”

The story that defined George Washington for generations is one of the greatest myths in American history.

It’s the story that Washington, when he was just six years old, took a hatchet to his father’s favorite cherry tree. And instead of lying about it, he told his father that he could not tell a lie; he was the culprit.

From the time I was a child, I was taught early on about the value of honesty through an oft-told story about our first president and a cherry tree.

“I cannot tell a lie,” the six-year-old George Washington is said to have told his father in confessing to damaging the tree with a hatchet. “I did cut it with my hatchet.”

It was a straightforward and useful story. It was also not true.

It turns out it was invented by an early Washington biographer, Mason Locke Weems, AKA Parson Weems, in 1806. In 1836, the tale was transformed into a children’s story that endured.

Since then, it evolved and took on new meanings and soared in popularity. By the late 19th century,  professional historians increasingly dismissed Weems and called the story apocryphal, a myth, a fabrication.

All Trump does is tell cherry tree stories.

The mendacity of  Donald Trump is legendary.

Lie after lie.

Fib after fib.

Fabrication after falsehood.

The Father of Our Country might not have been able to tell a lie, but that is all our cheating, lying, narcissistic president can do.

I cannot tell a lie. I despise Donald Trump.