From the Daily Mail:
But the reference to Gen. John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing inserted Trump into the day’s most riveting news story in a way his White House could come to regret.
There was criticism of the president for his use of it, with CNN anchor Jake Tapper calling it a ‘lie’.
Trump’s anecdote is a fictional story that he told in South Carolina ahead of the state’s Republican presidential primary in February 2016.
The story centers on Pershing’s supposed killing of prisoners during the early 1900s when his army was targeted by an insurgent guerrilla campaign of Muslim ‘Juramentados’ who targeted Christians with gruesome sword attacks.
Pershing was governor of the Philippines’ Moro Province at the time.
‘They were having terrorism problems, just like we do,’ Trump said. ‘He caught 50 terrorists that did tremendous damage and killed many people and he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pig’s blood.’
‘And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people, and the 50th person, he said; ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened’.’
‘And for 25 years,’ Trump ended, ‘there wasn’t a problem. For 25 years there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem. So we better start getting tough!’
On Thursday Trump upped Pershing’s effectiveness by 10 years, to 35. Problematically for him, the bullets-in-pigs-blood episode never happened.
Bullets in pig's blood maybe not, but in his own book Pershing talks about one officer who buried a Muslim insurgent with a pig and said it had become a practice in the army. That doesn't mean Pershing ordered it. It doesn't tell us how common a practice it was. It doesn't prove that it actually happened, but we do know that Pershing said it happened.
It's not something Pershing ordered. It's also not something he stopped (assuming he could have). But by Pershing's account, it's what the army was doing in the southern Philippines at the time.
The tweet didn't say just exactly what Pershing or somebody else did, but when I saw the story and was skeptical about the tweet, I went to Google Books to look up Pershing's memoir, and I found the story. It doesn't look like news sources did even the minimal research, but chose instead to focus on a story Trump told back during the campaign.
The pig's blood anecdote is a very silly story and hard to believe. How were the insurgents to know that bullets had been dipped in pig's blood? But if somebody says, "study what General Pershing did," why wouldn't you go to Pershing's own book on the subject to find out what he said was happening?
P.S. Snopes rated the "buried with a pig" story false, but also didn't look it up in Pershing's book. If Trump were a Democrat, they'd at least have called the story partially true.