At military parade, Trump celebrates rebels' occupation of airports during American Revolution

Here's Trump at his rained-out, sparsely-attended, $92m military parade:

During his hour-long speech at the grounds of Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., Trump stayed largely off politics. Trump praised the Americans' military efforts in the war against Great Britain. "Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets' red glare, it had nothing but victory," he said.

It's so perfectly mad that fact-checkers struggle to correct every element of wrongness in a single line. "Planes were not used in warfare until the 20th century", for example, allows the incorrect suggestion that there were airports (or indeed functional aircraft) in the 1770s.

In 1784, French inventor Jean-Pierre Blanchard fitted a propeller to a hot air balloon, creating the first aircraft that went places; the first successful fixed-wing airplane was the Wright Brothers' Flyer, flown in 1903.