Here is a perfect example of giving President Trump the detriment of the doubt rather than the benefit of the doubt. Trump's tweet, which is quoted by the author, gives no details about what General John Pershing did. Undaunted by the lack of detail, the author of the post interprets the tweet in such a way as to make Trump look dishonest or stupid. This isn't history; it's hatred.
Addendum: The following appeared in Time magazine on 24 February 2016:
In 1941, TIME ran a letter to the editor from a soldier named J. R. McKey who had served with Pershing in the Philippines decades before. In the letter, McKey describes using pigs in burials to deter Muslim insurgent activities, but does not ascribe the act to Pershing.
McKey wrote, "U.S. soldiers . . . had a pretty good cure for juramentado [Moro swordsmen] activities. Knowing the horror of the Mohammedan for any contact with swine, and particularly with its blood, these American roughnecks, when they had killed a juramentado, held for him a very public funeral. The body of the defunct bad man having been deposited in the grave, a pig was brought, stuck, its blood sprinkled freely over the D B M, the dead pig thrown in with him, and the burial completed."
Some reports do say that Pershing was engaged in burying Muslims with pigs or throwing pig's blood on them. According to the History News Network, a Chicago Daily Tribune article from 1927 describes Pershing sprinkling prisoners with pig's blood, then setting them free to warn others of being doused with the blood. "Those drops of porcine gore proved more powerful than bullets," the article wrote.
Christopher Capozzola, a history professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also cited an incident in which Pershing brought a pig's head to a ceasefire negotiation with a Muslim leader."So yes, there were deliberate efforts to offend Muslim Filipinos' religious sensibilities," Capozzola told TIME. "And yes, there was large-scale violence against their communities. But I know of no event like the one that Mr. Trump describes."
But of course Trump couldn't have been referring to these events in his tweet.
