On Friday, the New York Times released a bombshell report which said the FBI reacted to Donald Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey in May 2017 by opening an investigation into the president’s ties with Russia.
On Saturday, on Twitter, Trump reacted with familiar anger and abuse. Also true to form, Comey was more arch.
“I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made,” he wrote, adding an attribution: “FDR.”
“I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.” — FDR
— James Comey (@Comey) January 12, 2019
According to practice firmly established in the age of government and scandal by tweet, journalists raced to check whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt actually said those words. The answer was that he did – or some of them.
According to records made available online by the Franklin D Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, Roosevelt made the remark on the campaign trail, in a speech in Portland, Oregon, on 21 September 1932.
“My friends,” he said, “judge me by the enemies I have made.”
The man who would become the 32nd president was referring to the owners of power utilities whose actions he deemed to be against the interests of the American people. The transcript records that his remark was greeted with: “Cheers, prolonged applause.”
On Saturday, thanks to the miracles of Google, it also quickly became clear that Comey was by no means the first public figure to have reached for – and slightly misquoted – FDR’s Portland speech.
"I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 21, 2012
In November 2012, back when he was merely a property mogul, reality TV star and propagator of racist conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, about whose recent re-election he was decidedly cross, Trump tweeted the line himself.
