I have to respond to President Donald Trump’s unjustified attacks on American museums and Vice President JD Vance’s dismal Aug. 24 interview on “Meet the Press.”

The history of the United States is not a tale of a “niceburg” afloat upon a sea of nostalgia. The story of our nation reflects both the promises in its birth and the issues and problems that accompanied it.

Museums serve as archives, showing where we began, how far we as a people have come and where we aspire to go. At the same time, there are exhibits that show what issues and crises Americans faced and how we have responded to them.

For the president to blithely state that there is too much focus on “how bad Slavery was” is a gratuitous insult to the history and legacy of African Americans. Slavery meant enduring and surviving the horrors of being treated as the property of another. Its legacy has been Jim Crow, extralegal violence and the continuing fight to obtain the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

To elect to remove the history of African Americans, which includes slavery, is nothing less than an attempt to whitewash the story of America for the benefit of an intolerant, insensitive few.

I would add this is also applicable to the Latino and Asian communities, which have contributed to and benefited from the American story, even as they suffered its uglier effects.

As for the interview the vice president gave on “Meet the Press,” given the recent bloody actions by Russia in Ukraine, his answers on how wars end at best reflect an unmitigated naivete on how power politics work and at worst reflect a disgraceful commitment to historical ignorance.

World War I and World War II did not end by negotiation but by surrender of the defeated powers. Vance would do well to read the history of the 1938 Munich Agreement (an appeasement) and the bitter war it produced.

Vladimir Putin is, in my view, playing president and vice president for suckers.

Stephen L. Patrick

Lititz