Texas pediatrician ‘no longer employed' after post about pro-Trump flood victims
'We were made aware of a social media comment from one of our physicians,' read a statement from Blue Fish Pediatrics circulated late Sunday. 'The individual is no longer employed by Blue Fish Pediatrics.'
The statement also said: 'We strongly condemn the comments that were made in that post. That post does not reflect the values, standards or mission of Blue Fish Pediatrics. We do not support or condone any statement that politicizes tragedy, diminishes human dignity, or fails to clearly uphold compassion for every child and family, regardless of background or beliefs.'
Blue Fish Pediatrics' statement neither named the physician in question nor specified whether she had resigned or was dismissed. But multiple publicly accessible social media posts identified her as Dr Christina Propst. A Guardian source familiar with the situation confirmed the accuracy of the posts naming Propst. And, at the time it issued the statement, Blue Fish Pediatrics had recently unpublished Propst's biographical page from its website.
Attempts to contact Propst weren't immediately successful.
The post attributed to Propst prompted many – including on social media – to pressure Blue Fish Pediatrics to take action against her. For one, while they are entitled to the same constitutional free speech rights everyone else in the country is, many US healthcare providers are required by their employers to avoid publicizing opinions which could undermine trust in their profession among members of the public.
But the timing of the post also caused offense, coming after communities along Texas's Guadalupe River were overwhelmed early Friday from flash flooding triggered by torrential rain. The river rose 26ft (8 meters) in 45 minutes after 1.8tn gallons of rain fell over a region including Kerr county, Texas, about 286 miles (460km ) west of Texas.
As of Monday, officials were reporting more than 90 people had died – with others missing – during the flood. Many of those reported dead were in Kerr county. And many were children, including some who were attending Camp Mystic, a 99-year-old, all-girls, nondenominational Christian institution.
In the post that preceded the end of her time at Blue Fish Pediatrics, Propst alluded to how Kerr county had – like Texas as a whole – voted in favor of Trump as he defeated former vice-president Kamala Harris in November's White House election. Trump's administration has since eliminated mentions of the ongoing climate crisis and its consequences, one of which is downpours like the one that devastated Kerr becoming more common. He has also mused about 'phasing out' the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), in part so that the president's office could be in charge of distributing disaster relief funds and ultimately 'give out less money'.
'May all visitors, children, non-Maga voters and pets be safe and dry,' said the post, which invoked an acronym for Trump's 'Make America great again' slogan. 'Kerr county Maga voted to gut Fema. They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for.'
The post concluded with the phrase: 'Bless their hearts,' which in the US south is often used as a condescending insult.
Kerr county residents who survived the flood have since spoken about losing all of their possessions, including their homes. They have also recounted seeking what have proven to be elusive answers about the level of preparedness from authorities in charge of protecting their communities.
In short order, the post made its way to Blue Fish Pediatrics, which is described as an independent partner of Houston's well-known Memorial Hermann hospital network. The clinic chain – which was tagged by users demanding that it act against Propst – said in a statement that the group was immediately placing the message's author on leave. A subsequent statement indicated that the post's author was no longer an employee of the chain while expressing 'full support to the families and the surrounding communities who are grieving, recovering and searching for hope'.
Meanwhile, a statement from Memorial Hermann said that the post's author was not directly employed by the network. The statement, though, made it a point to say, 'We … strongly condemn these statements … [and] we have zero tolerance for such rhetoric which does not reflect the mission, vision or values of our system.'
Propst's unpublished biography described her as a native of New York who graduated from Princeton University in 1991. She later graduated from New Orleans's Tulane medical school, received certifications from the American board and academy of pediatrics and spent 17 years in group practice in Houston before joining Blue Fish in 2018.
According to the unpublished biography, Propst was voted 'best pediatrician' in numerous reader polls conducted by Houston's Bellaire Examiner newspaper.
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Daily Mail
43 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Ghislaine Maxwell 'is not suicidal' and spends her days behind bars quietly helping educate fellow inmates
's life behind bars has been laid bare by one of her former cellmates. Jessica Watkins - who was imprisoned for her part in the 2020 Capitol riots - said Maxwell, 63, has rebranded herself as a teacher to other inmates. The 42-year-old transgender Army veteran said Jeffrey Epstein's former pal mostly keeps to herself as she serves her 20-year stretch for child sex-trafficking charges. Watkins, a former Oath Keeper, was imprisoned alongside the 63-year-old inside FCI Tallahassee. Maxwell notoriously helped Epstein exploit and abuse multiple minors over the course of a decade. Epstein's victims alleged they were procured by Maxwell and passed around his billionaire friends and associates who regularly visited his homes, which included his private island. He was eventually found dead in his cell from an apparent suicide while awaiting trial. Speaking with this week, Watkins said Maxwell mostly kept to herself inside the prison, a low-security facility in the Florida capital where she has modeled herself as a mentor to other jailbirds. It comes after Watkins said she wanted to get 'ahead of potential narratives' about Maxwell, insisting that 'she isn't suicidal in the least.' Recalling the first time she registered the disgraced socialite, Watkins said she had to do a double take to make sure it was her. She said: 'It's an open dorm, it's a big bay full of bunk beds, there is no cells. I walked by and I seen her there. 'I did a double take because I recognized her face immediately from the news. I was like "is that who I think it is?" 'My friend who was with me was like "I don't know - who is it?" I caught her up on the situation. Started asking around and it was definitely her.' Watkins, who had her sentenced commuted in January, said she and Maxwell would go speak several times a week, typically while exercising around the yard. She said that Maxwell brought up her own case a few times and only made one mention of Epstein, her former lover and boss, that she could remember. 'We don't talk about cases as inmates because people will think you're a snitch. It's an unspoken rule among inmates. You don't ask. '[Maxwell] did bring it up a couple times but it was very very hush hush. She didn't talk a lot about it. 'She did say that the DOJ had no interest in her until after, her exact words were until after Jeffrey, and then she paused for a second and said died. That was the only time he ever came up.' According to Watkins, Maxwell came across as being at ease inside prison, adding that she 'didn't seem unduly worried.' She added: 'The open dorm situation is very good. There's like 40 or 50 people around so if anybody tried anything, there's witnesses. She seemed very at ease, very calm and approachable.' Watkins said that anybody involved in child or sex cases is somewhat protected by the authorities. 'If someone is to retaliate against her they catch an entire indictment and can get like 10 years or something. 'I don't think she feared anything from the other inmates. She was also very helpful. She worked in the law library.' In the U.S., correctional facilities offer inmates the resources to access the courts and further understand their legal rights and options with in-house law libraries. Watkins said Maxwell worked inside the one in Tallahassee and provided fellow inmates with the right legal forms and offered advice, even running her own classes. 'She was very concerned about peoples' medical wellbeing and so she did have that kind side to her.' Despite this, Watkins added that Maxwell did make her uneasy, due to her being aware of the nature of her case. She added: '[Maxwell] made me nervous. Anytime she came around she made me nervous - but she was very nice.' Watkins said that outside of helping others with legal cases, Maxwell spent her time working out and reading books constantly - with a taste for classic literature. She never recalled seeing Maxwell with a tablet inside or ever spending time inside the TV room, deciding to work on her case or read instead. Watkins also took aim at the food available to inmates as being 'not fit for human consumption' while saying that she recalled Maxwell eating kosher meals. Maxwell is said to have kept to herself, and had one close friend who Watkins identified only as Lisa. Lisa told others she was a doctor before her prison stint. According to Watkins the facility had problems with drug use among inmates, particularly the prescription opioid Suboxone and crystal meth. Due to this, she said she and Maxwell bonded over not being hooked on the substances. 'We avoided most of the inmates cause they were high all the time and we didn't want to be around that. She would gravitate towards people who were also sober,' Watkins said. 'We walked the track one day and we were trying to calculate how many people were sober in the prison. I think we came up with 12.' The only other details of her private life Maxwell gave out was that her father had worked in the media, according to Watkins. Epstein and Maxwell were previously pictured alongside President Donald Trump, but the former socialite only mentioned the president once, Watkins noted. She said: 'There was something in the news about Trump having Jeffrey Epstein at Mar-a-Lago or something. 'I guess she had done some interview and the media had asked her about President Trump, and she came back and said, "Well, like why are you interested in Trump and not the Clintons?" 'I guess they were far closer, I don't know. It was a passing statement. She never really elaborated on that.' Watkins insisted Maxwell was not suicidal, suggesting she was unlikely to meet the same fate as Epstein, who was found dead in a New York City jail cell in 2019. At the time of Epstein's death, which was ruled a suicide, he had pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. His suicide fueled speculation he was assassinated as part of a cover-up to protect other high-profile individuals who were potentially complicit in his crimes. It was later suggested the well-connected financier maintained a list of clients to whom underage girls were trafficked.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
If you don't understand Oklahoma, you can't understand America
In a moment, I will tell you how I learned to love Oklahoma, a state I have had to point out on a map more times than I can count to Americans and foreigners alike. One with 77 crimson red counties and a license plate that once simply read: 'OKLAHOMA IS OK.' But first, it is important to tell you about my first Oklahoma school history lesson – one I learned when I was eight years old, after my parents moved our family cross-country. Tulsa's reputation as a haven for the devout held deep appeal for my Jamaican parents, whose lives were steeped in Christian faith. The city's predictable rhythms, its flatness, even its so-called boringness – it all offered a reprieve from what they saw as the chaos and moral drift of our old home in New York. One day, my new school gathered every fourth grader and led us to the backlot. We were lined up across the lawn and equipped with wagons, protractors and dulled stakes to drive into the ground. We waited for a teacher's voice to yell, 'Go!' We were to take off quickly, racing each other to find a plot we wanted to take for ourselves. We measured, as well as fourth graders could, the land we wanted to be ours. The entire affair was raucous as us newly minted 'pioneers' yelled, laughed and named our plots whatever our imaginations would allow. We were re-enacting a land run – one of seven held between 1889 and 1895 – that marked the opening of lands once deeded to Indigenous nations, only to be seized again as part of their forced removal across what we now call the American west. It may be hard to believe, but Oklahoma City's public schools didn't get around to banning the practice from history lessons until 2014. In its place came a sanitized, feelgood version of state history – one that, like many civil war re-enactments, recasts the fight to preserve slavery as a story of bravery and idealism. During those history lessons, the ugliness was not even hiding in plain sight. The disregard for the lives on which the state was built was – and still is – a point of pride. Today, the University of Oklahoma – my alma mater and the state's flagship university – leads every game, welcome event and recruiting fair with its famous chant: 'Boomer!' followed by an echoed 'Sooner!' It's a rallying cry repeated across all its athletic programs, which, like many state schools, are funded far more robustly than classrooms. Boomers were settlers, mostly white, who agitated in the late 1800s to open land in Indian territory (present-day Oklahoma) for white homesteaders. Led by pugnacious figures such as David Lewis Payne (the putative 'Father of Oklahoma'), they staged illegal incursions before the land was officially opened. The Sooners entered the land before the legal start time of a land run, cheating to claim the best plots. These rule-breakers are now mythologized in Oklahoma culture. The university's mascot is not an animal or a person, but a covered wagon: an emblem of the pioneering spirit that carved a life from theft and violence. For much of my life, I struggled to feel pride in a place like this – not just because of its history, but because of the lie we told about it. The real story was buried beneath a more palatable narrative, where horrors were treated as little more than pit stops on the way to celebrating homesteaders. Land theft from Native nations, the displacement of Black families, the racial terror that shadowed statehood – these were footnotes, if they were mentioned at all. But over time, it was precisely those harder truths that gave me something solid to stand on. That reckoning – naming the harm, sitting with its consequences – is not just about the past. It's a tool we need now, in 2025, when the country is suspended between two impulses: nostalgia and denial. Across the nation, the fight over whose history counts is really a fight over who gets to claim America. The violence that birthed Oklahoma was not incidental, it was foundational. And unless we confront that, there's no building anything real. Misunderstand Oklahoma, and you misunderstand the country. Growing up in Tulsa, the north star for me and my friends was college, followed by a job that could take us anywhere but Oklahoma. Dallas and Houston seemed almost idyllic: more affordable than New York or Los Angeles while still offering an upgraded version of a lifestyle we were already familiar with. Nothing made me want to stay. Downtown Tulsa felt frozen in amber, a relic of its 'oil capital of the world' heyday, long faded. The place felt ghostly. To me, its nightlife, diversity, direct flights and appetite for progress were all but nonexistent. Until recently, Oklahoma had not had a major-league sports team – though the Oklahoma City Thunder recently broke through, winning the 2025 NBA finals. What professional sports teams we had were literally and colloquially minor, baseball teams with stadiums that left much to be desired. This is a story of haunting familiarity to people whose home towns are seen as flyovers, rarely seen as worth a stop. And then, everything changed. In the decade since I left, Oklahoma has been refashioning its cities, courting new talent, and, according to the Kansas City Federal Reserve, beginning to reverse its long-running brain drain. College graduates like me once left in droves. Now, it seems that the tide is shifting. If you are an artist, Tulsa will subsidize your loft or studio. If Teach for America has whet your appetite, Tulsa will help with your housing costs. If you have a startup that might struggle with raising venture capital on the coasts, you will find that Tulsa will offer it to you. Even remote workers with no ties to the state can receive $10,000 or help with a down payment, just for showing up and staying for a year. Convenient, when the airport now offers direct flights to places my younger self could only dream about: New York, Miami, Los Angeles. These are all points of pride for many. But for all the praise, concerns do remain: rising housing costs, shallow community ties, and whether programs such as Tulsa Remote offer lasting benefits to longtime residents, especially since those efforts are not government-led efforts but philanthropic ones, and rely entirely on the continued generosity of a few wealthy individuals. Reinvention has always been part of Oklahoma's playbook. Again and again, the state has tried to become something new by recruiting outsiders, whether settlers in the land runs or now digital nomads with graduate degrees, while asking far less of itself when it comes to honoring the people and histories already here. That strategy may bring headlines, but it rarely brings healing. No matter how overjoyed I was to see my home state in the headlines for the NBA championship – rather than for being ranked 49th in education or 49th in healthcare – my pride doesn't come from Oklahoma's polished reinvention. It lies in the hard work of seeing my state clearly, in all its contradictions: the violence and the love, the buried history and the stubborn hope. And to do that, we need to go back nearly 140 years. I have spent the past five years combing through archives and crisscrossing Oklahoma and the Great Plains, chasing the story of Edward McCabe: the visionary who tried to create a Black state within the US, a figure who stood at the epicenter of some of America's most volatile collisions. In the 1880s, McCabe, the first Black statewide elected official in the old west, came to the Oklahoma territory with a vision so bold it startled both Black allies and white detractors: a state colonized by Black people, governed by their own hands, and as McCabe promised, 'unmolested by the selfish greed of the white man'. It was a dream not of mere survival, but of sovereignty – and it's why a reporter traveling from Minnesota dubbed him 'The One Who Would Be Moses'. That dream, like so many others on that soil, was paved over by the very forces it tried to escape: anti-Black violence, white economic opportunism and settler colonialism's endless appetite. McCabe did not ask for a utopia without contradiction. His ride to Langston – one of the all-Black towns he helped found – from his post in the territorial capital of Guthrie, where he served as county treasurer during the 1891 land run, was anything but safe. White cowboys stopped him on the road, ordered him to turn back, to stop where he stood. He refused, more than once. Then they opened fire. He lived to tell the story, but just barely. It was a warning: dreams built on contested ground do not go unchallenged, and Black ambition could be answered with bullets. His story, in all its promise and peril, was not that of a perfect man with a clean mission. He promoted colonization while ignoring the fact that the land he hoped to reclaim for Black people had already been promised, stolen, and promised again to Indigenous nations. He stood at the nexus of Black aspiration and Native dispossession. And in doing so, he reflected the central American dilemma: that ambition will never be clean because the ground itself is stolen. McCabe's dream of a Black-governed state was mocked, sabotaged and eventually erased from civic memory. But in the erasures, we find the outlines of what was feared: not just Black people having land, but Black people on their own terms. That was always the deeper threat. Not a land grab, but a claim to belong. A declaration of autonomy. That is why I return to him: not because he got it right, but because he tried. His efforts, and those of his peers, can still be seen in the 13 all-Black towns in Oklahoma (down from the 50 that once stood tall). These towns were founded as havens – places where Black Americans could govern themselves, own land and live free from white oversight. Many who built and settled these towns were just one generation removed from slavery, carrying the memory – often their own or that of their parents – of what it meant to be owned, uprooted and denied the right to belong. Their movement westward was not merely an act of escape; it was an act of creation. They were not just fleeing the violence of Reconstruction's collapse; they were imagining something freer, fuller and governed by their own hands. Today, those towns are no longer exclusively Black, nor are they legally restricted to Black residents. Anyone can move there, marry there, build a life there. But their founding spirit endures. McCabe spoke in what newspapers would call 'nigger talk' – a term of derision meant to dismiss any Black person who dared to articulate sovereignty, self-governance or the audacious idea of belonging on their own terms. But McCabe wore the insult as armor. He turned the slur into strategy, the scorn into a blueprint. And they tried to kill him for it. But what they didn't realize is that this was not just talk, it was a creed. A blueprint. A framework for building a world not yet born. That is the lesson Oklahoma teaches. Oklahoma has always been a place America used to test its next chapter. After Reconstruction failed, and the US government abandoned its promises to Native nations, parts of the territory were branded 'no man's land' – as if no person of value had ever lived there. But it was not empty; it was further removed. Oklahoma could have been a blueprint for belonging, a place carved out for those most marginalized: Black people fleeing racial terror, Native nations pushed from their homelands, immigrants seeking a foothold. Instead, it became a proving ground for the ugly zero-sum politics that plague America today, pitting groups against each other. Today, Oklahoma remains at the forefront of deciding what counts as American – whether in its classrooms, its public religion or its laws. Just look at how it is redrawing church-state boundaries in public education, and even forcing social studies textbooks to convey 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact. If we are serious about holding this country together, we have to reckon with the real American inheritance, where ambition and betrayal, dreaming and dispossession, are not opposite. They are co-tenants. What McCabe knew is that place matters. Not just as geography, but as some kind of theology. It matters that this particular expression of Black belonging emerged not in areas with longstanding, high concentrations of Black people – but in a place where white America was still shaping into its newest frontier. And it was in this place being reinvented that McCabe thought he could be most successful. My parents left New York searching for moral clarity in the middle of the country, but found none of this history in any brochure. For me, a child of migrants raised on the rules of holiness, I learned the unholy truth in reverse: that even sanctified ground can be built atop stolen land. That even the righteous can inherit the sins of the empire. Oklahoma is a map of America's legacies. It doesn't pretend to be a blank slate. Instead, its history offers a truer, unvarnished portrait of America, with its ambitions, its erasures, its stubborn beauty and its almost devotional violence. It's not the place where dreams go to die. It has long been the place where dreams go to collide. Caleb Gayle is the author of Black Moses, a Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State, out 12 August (Riverhead books)
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Pete Hegseth is skirting law by bringing back Confederate names of army bases
Since Donald Trump returned to office this year, his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has ripped the new names off a series of US army bases and brought back their old traitorous Confederate names. His actions have angered Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress, prompting a rare rebuke of the Trump administration by the Republican-controlled Congress last Tuesday. The GOP-led House of Representatives Armed Services Committee voted on 15 July to block Hegseth from renaming the bases after Confederates. Two Republicans voted with the Democrats on the committee to pass the measure, which was an amendment to the Pentagon's budget bill. 'What this administration is doing, particularly this secretary of defense, is sticking his finger in the eye of Congress,' said Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican representative who voted to stop Hegseth. Hegseth's move elicited bipartisan anger because it flouted the law; Congress passed legislation in January 2021 to create a commission to choose new names for the bases named for Confederates and mandated that its recommendations be implemented by the Pentagon. That law was passed over a veto by Trump in the final days of his first term, and the name changes were later implemented by the Pentagon during the Biden administration. The law is still on the books, and so in order to return to the old Confederate names, Hegseth has openly played games with their namesakes. The secretary claims he has renamed the bases after American soldiers from throughout US history who were not Confederates. But they all conveniently have the same last names as the original Confederate namesakes of the bases. For example, Fort Bragg is now supposedly named for Roland Bragg, who was an army paratrooper in the second world war; Fort Benning is now supposedly named for Fred Benning, a soldier who served in the army in the first world war. Before the House vote, Hegseth's efforts to skirt the law were also challenged in the Senate. In a hearing in June, Angus King, a senator from Maine, told Hegseth that he was returning the bases to the names of 'people who took up arms against their country on behalf of slavery'. Hegseth insisted that the Pentagon had found non-Confederates with the same names to stay within 'the limits of what Congress allowed us to do'. But during the same hearing, Hegseth briefly dropped the pretense that he wasn't returning to the original Confederate names. He argued that 'there is a legacy, a connection' for veterans with the old names. King replied that Hegseth's actions were 'an insult to the people of the United States'. Above all, Hegseth's actions show a troubling ignorance of the lives of the original Confederate namesakes; their easily-researched backgrounds reveal what terrible role models they make for modern American military personnel. Braxton Bragg was one of the most incompetent Confederate generals of the civil war. His subordinates repeatedly and clandestinely tried to get him fired, with one writing to the Confederate secretary of war that 'nothing but the hand of God can save us or help us as long as we have our present commander'. Bragg finally lost his command after he was out-generaled by Union General Ulysses S Grant and his army was routed at the Battle of Chattanooga in 1863. One of the few biographies written about him is entitled Braxton Bragg, the Most Hated Man in the Confederacy. And yet Bragg lives on today as the namesake of the largest and most important military base in the United States Army. Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, North Carolina was originally built in 1918, as part of a rushed effort by the army to construct new bases after the United States entered the first world war. The site offered the army cheap and abundant land, and it quickly built a base and surrounding military reservation totaling 251 sq miles. Eager to win local white support, the army agreed to name the new base after a Confederate; Bragg was chosen because he was originally from North Carolina. By the time the base was built, the civil war had been over for more than 50 years, yet the south was still in the grips of the 'the Lost Cause' theory of the war, which romanticized the civil war and held that the south had fought for state's rights, not slavery, and that the Confederacy had fielded better officers and men and had only lost because of the overwhelming resources of the north. By 1918, when Bragg's name was attached to the base, the generation of Confederate officers who hated him were gone, along with the memory of his military blunders. That pattern held for a series of major bases built throughout the south during the first and second world wars. Fort Benning was also built in 1918 near Columbus, Georgia. At the request of the Columbus Rotary Club, the army named it for Henry Lewis Benning, who was best known as a pro-slavery political firebrand from Columbus who helped draft Georgia's ordinance of secession. Benning was one of the pre-eminent white supremacists of his day, and he openly admitted that his state seceded because of slavery, not states rights. In one speech, he said that his state seceded because of a 'deep conviction on the part of Georgia that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery … If things are allowed to go on as they are … we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it supposed that the white race will stand for that?' Benning served in the Confederate army, but it was his political role as a proponent of a southern slavocracy that first brought him fame and prominence. By the 21st century, there were still 10 army bases that were named for Confederates, and the Pentagon repeatedly resisted efforts to change their names, arguing that tradition outweighed the fact that the bases were named for traitors who had fought to preserve slavery. The Confederate base names were finally changed after the 2020 George Floyd protests; Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty, while Fort Benning became Fort Moore, named for Vietnam War hero Hal Moore and his wife, Julia Moore. (Mel Gibson played Hal Moore and Madeleine Stowe played Julia Moore in the 2002 movie We Were Soldiers.) But those new names didn't survive Trump's return to office. Hegseth hasn't stopped with army bases. The Pentagon has announced it will strip the name off the US navy ship Harvey Milk, which was named for the gay rights pioneer who was assassinated in 1978, and rename it for Oscar V Peterson, a sailor who won the Congressional Medal of Honor during the second world war. But one thing is certain: Braxton Bragg's civil war contemporaries would be shocked to discover that a man so widely derided as a loser and a martinet during his lifetime is still at the center of a national debate 160 years after the war ended. During the war, one Confederate newspaper editor described him as a man with 'an iron hand and a wooden head'. Grant, the man who so badly beat Bragg during the war, took great pleasure in making fun of Bragg and his ridiculous behavior when he later wrote his memoirs. Grant recounted one infamous episode involving Bragg from the time before the civil war when both men served in the small, pre-war US army. 'On one occasion, when stationed at a post … (Bragg) was commanding one of the companies and at the same time acting as post quartermaster … As commander of the company he made a requisition upon the quartermaster – himself – for something he wanted. As quartermaster he declined to fill the requisition and endorsed on the back of it his reasons for so doing. As company commander he responded to this, urging that his requisition called for nothing but what he was entitled to, and that it was the duty of the quartermaster to fill it. As quartermaster he still persisted that he was right … Bragg referred the whole matter to the commanding officer of the post. The latter exclaimed: 'My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarrelling with yourself!' In his memoirs, Grant wrote that Bragg was 'naturally disputatious'. So maybe Braxton Bragg would fit in perfectly with Donald Trump after all.
