Sunday, May 28, 2017

No Honor--Trump Steals Family Seal

At the Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, which hosted the Senior PGA. Championship this weekend, the president’s coat of arms is everywhere-- but it turns out the coat of arms was ripped off from a Welsh family and Trump is not even allowed to use it over in the U.K.

The British are known to take matters of heraldry seriously-- the seal was granted by British authorities in 1939 to Joseph Edward Davies, the third husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post.  Joseph D. Tydings, a Democrat and former United States senator from Maryland who is the grandson of Davies, learned that Trump was using the emblem without permission when he visited Mar-a-Lago.  The copied version of the family seal is identical, except for the word "Integrity", which was ironically eliminated and replaced with the name "Trump"

Trump thad ride to bring the American version to Scotland a decade ago. He used the emblem on promotional materials when he started marketing a new golf course development in Aberdeenshire, on Scotland’s east coast. But the materials ran afoul of the coat-of-arms authorities in Scotland.

The College of Arms, which oversees coats of arms in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, provided more detail. The emblem originally submitted in 2007 by Trump to Britain’s trademark office matched one that had been granted to the Davies, an American of Welsh descent who once served as ambassador to the Soviet Union. The trademark was denied.

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