Harvard Law Republicans call out ‘fake quote’ in Harvard College Republican letter denouncing Trump

After the Harvard University College Republicans made a splash by publicly denouncing Donald Trump, another Republican group on the campus zinged them for using a fake quote in their now widely circulated statement.

The Republican Club, the oldest such campus group in the nation, said it decided to officially oppose Trump after polling its own members to find only 10 percent of them supported the New York billionaire, The Harvard Crimson reported.

“The rhetoric he espouses — from racist slander to misogynistic taunts — is not consistent with our conservative principles, and his repeated mocking of the disabled and belittling of the sacrifices made by prisoners of war, Gold Star families, and Purple Heart recipients is not only bad politics, but absurdly cruel,” the students wrote.

“[Former President Ronald Reagan] would be ashamed of Donald Trump. We are too.”

The letter also included an allegedly apocryphal quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, — “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to good, she will cease to be great” — a slip-up caught by Harvard Law School Republicans president Kirk Jing, the Daily Caller reported.

“No greater tribute can be paid to a man than to credit him with a great action he did not take, or a great saying he did not coin,” Michael Ledeen wrote in his biography of the French historian who famously visited early America. “By that high standard, Tocqueville has been fulsomely praised. Among others Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, Ross Perot, and Pat Buchanan have credited Tocqueville…[but] he never said it, and doesn’t believe it.”

“The Harvard Republican Club speaks for itself, as does their statement,” president Kirk Jing wrote. “It fittingly concludes with a fake quote from Tocqueville, misrepresenting both him and Trump to contort reality into fitting ideological clichés. Fortunately, actual Republican voters concluded that elites do not have a right to rule simply because they can recite tired political clichés in lieu of everyday reality.”

Jing may have a point about Harvard campus spats not having much of an effect on the presidential election at large —though they are fun to watch.