Photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg/Getty Images
There’s something increasingly strange about Donald Trump’s ongoing — indeed, intensifying — campaign to demand the sunniest possible view of American history from any institution he can influence or control. He made this an official priority in a March 27 executive order.
“It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing,” the order read.
Trump went on to say Washington, D.C., museumgoers must not be “subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” The order threatened to withhold Smithsonian Institution funding if it did not restore itself into a “symbol of inspiration and American greatness — igniting the imagination of young minds, honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.”
And he demanded that the Department of the Interior ensure that all public monuments under its jurisdiction “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
While he was at it, Trump ordered the reversal of steps to remove monuments during the Biden administration in a transparent effort to restore Confederate and neo-Confederate propaganda displays.
This wasn’t a passing fancy. Trump keeps coming back to the dire need to whitewash American history, as in this recent Truth Social tirade:
What makes this hostility to any evidence that America, over two and a half centuries, has lacked even a scintilla of Greatness so very strange is that no one has said more nasty and disparaging things about our country than Donald J. Trump during the most recent Democratic administrations.
Trump’s first Inaugural Address is remembered as the “American Carnage” speech because of its relentless picture of a desolate nation betrayed by its leaders. He said:
For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry;
Subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military;
We’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own;
And spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.
We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon.
One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind.
The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.
Where’s the “Success” and “Brightness” in that portrait of America?
But that speech is indeed downright sunny compared to the depiction of America as a violent hellhole — indeed, as a failed state — presented by Trump every single day during his 2024 comeback campaign. According to his stump speech, the country was in the grip of vast immigrant gangs brought in to bankrupt the federal government, vote illegally (by the millions!), and “destroy democracy.” Worse yet, one of the country’s two major political parties was totally led and mostly supported by people who “hate America” and were fully in on the conspiracy to convert it into a magnet for the “worst people in the world” who poured out of prisons and mental institutions to take over our communities.
Even today, the president is still talking about this country as a vast dystopia. Again and again, he is claiming emergency conditions to justify his dramatic demands for unlimited executive powers. He speaks of our cities as ravaged by out-of-control crime so severe that a military response is necessary, hand-in-glove with a mass-deportation effort he constantly boasts of as unlike anything the country has seen before.
So as he nobly struggles to restore this hell on Earth, Trump is equally concerned with ensuring that the 232 years of American history leading up to the Obama and Biden eras are remembered with a gauzy glow inspiring gratitude, pride, and optimism.
No wonder his followers want to find veterans of those despicable administrations and lock them up. It was a perfect nation until 2008. And soon our museums will say so.
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