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The troubled flight of Trump's trial balloons

The troubled flight of Trump's trial balloons

Gaza, Greenland, Canada, Panama...and the Kennedy Center?

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Richard Galant
Feb 09, 2025
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Now It's History
Now It's History
The troubled flight of Trump's trial balloons
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A 1783 drawing by Claude Louis Desrais.

In the early 1780s, two brothers in southeastern France began experimenting with balloons, looking for a way to reliably lift them to the skies. Joseph Montgolfier took note of his wife’s blouse “inflating when she hung it over the hearth to dry,” as Richard Holmes noted in his book, “The Age of Wonder.”

So Joseph …

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