{"id":397741,"date":"2025-09-04T16:55:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T16:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/397741\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T16:55:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T16:55:11","slug":"trump-wants-to-rewrite-american-history-maybe-he-should-learn-it-first-sidney-blumenthal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/397741\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump wants to rewrite American history. Maybe he should learn it first | Sidney Blumenthal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of all the presidents, Donald Trump<\/a> \u2013 the man who would remake the Smithsonian<\/a> and alter its presentation of \u201chow bad slavery was\u201d, as he put it<\/a> \u2013 is surely the most ignorant of American history itself.<\/p>\n

What Trump doesn\u2019t know fills the Library of Congress, whose chief librarian he has fired<\/a>, along with driving out the heads of the National Archives<\/a> and the National Portrait Gallery<\/a>, as well as dissolving programs<\/a> of the National Endowment for the Humanities and defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting<\/a>, which as a result has paused the acclaimed American Experience<\/a> documentary series.<\/p>\n

Trump claims he is tearing down the entire federal support for history in order to reveal the true story. In his executive order<\/a> of 27 March, \u201cRestoring Truth and Sanity to American History\u201d, he stated: \u201cOver the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation\u2019s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.\u201d The \u201cimproper ideology\u201d that needs to be extirpated is a \u201cdivisive, race-centered ideology\u201d.<\/p>\n

The White House issued a memo<\/a> on 21 August, titled \u201cPresident Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian\u201d, citing a broad swath of scattered incidents ranging from \u201cwokeness\u201d to representations of immigration to a picture of the former leading health official Anthony Fauci, who is anathema to the right.<\/p>\n

Trump appointed a review panel<\/a> to be headed by his vice-president, JD Vance, and the attorney and White House staffer Lindsey Halligan, who is actually the one in charge of the project. Echoing Trump, she explained<\/a>: \u201cWe don\u2019t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation\u2019s history may have been bad.\u201d She told<\/a> Fox News, \u201cWhat I saw when I was going through the museum, personally, was an overemphasis on slavery, and I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we\u2019ve come since slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Trump White House aide elaborated<\/a>: \u201cPresident Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable.\u201d The aide had the Trump formula down pat: after the purge comes the retribution. Trump tweeted<\/a>: \u201cI have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Trump met on 28 August with Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian and founding director of the Smithsonian\u2019s African American Museum of History<\/a>, he brought along Halligan as his expert.<\/p>\n

Her credentials for this crucial assignment in the culture war \u2013 after twice competing in the Miss Colorado USA beauty pageant, then becoming an insurance lawyer in Florida \u2013 must have been her work as one of Trump\u2019s attorneys involved<\/a> in the case over classified documents at Mar-a-Lago<\/a>. Trump initially noticed her<\/a> at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach in 2021. She is now, in addition to her other duties, the de facto Trump White House historian-in-residence. She told the Washington Post<\/a> she was interested in the civil war and westward expansion. A former colleague described her as \u201ca fan of history\u201d.<\/p>\n

Beyond Halligan\u2019s comments in a letter<\/a> about packaging the past into a palatable Happy Meal of \u201cideals\u201d and \u201cAmericanism\u201d, the administration did not present its actual alternative history or the policies that flow from it. Trump bellowed that the Smithsonian contained<\/a> \u201cNothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future\u201d.<\/p>\n

But this gospel of positive-thinking twaddle aside, Trump, proudly ignorant though he is, has for years articulated a vision of American history. That vision does not emphasize the strides the nation has made through tumultuous struggle since the abolition of slavery. Instead, it honors the those who defended slavery, committed treason to preserve it and claim it to be a worthy American \u201cheritage\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trump has repeatedly sought to shield the Confederate statues and symbols<\/a> erected as tribute to the \u201clost cause\u201d myth. He has expressed and unqualified admiration for Robert E Lee as a quintessential American hero almost always coupled with belittling remarks about Lincoln. His view of history squarely aligns him with neo-Confederates, not least those who carried the Confederate flag at the US Capitol during the insurrection on 6 January 2021 and whom he subsequently pardoned.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s version of history is not, however, simply reactionary nostalgia, or treacly kitsch for the restoration of \u201cUncle Herschel\u201d, the \u201cOld-Timer\u201d to the Cracker Barrel logo. His use of the culture war is a key element to advance his policy agenda.<\/p>\n

After the civil war, in reaction to Reconstruction, the southern slaveholding oligarchy regrouped to form the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist militias, most under the direction of former Confederate officers, to destroy the possibilities of emancipation and civil rights in the name of what they called \u201credemption\u201d. Nearly a century later, the civil rights revolution of the 1960s overthrew the southern segregationist regime to restore and expand the enforcement of the original civil war amendments to the US constitution \u2013 the 14th amendment securing equal protection under the law and birthright citizenship and the 15th amendment protecting Black voting rights. The great southern historian C Vann Woodward called the civil rights movement the Second Reconstruction.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s neo-Confederate culture war is the symbolic cover for his full-scale political assault<\/a> on those civil war amendments and the further enactment of their intent in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He is directing a second redemption to tear down the Second Reconstruction.<\/p>\n

The attack on the constitution has been swift, comprehensive and sharply partisan. Trump is seeking to nullify birthright citizenship in the 14th amendment. He is challenging<\/a> the Voting Rights Act and abandoning previous justice department positions on the constitutionality of remedying racially discriminatory voting maps in support of arguments in the supreme court case Louisiana v Callais.<\/p>\n

In fear of losing Republican control of the Congress in the 2026 elections, he has encouraged states to ignore the practice of redistricting congressional districts based on the census and instead to redraw racially discriminatory lines to create new Republican seats.<\/p>\n

The Smithsonian would do well to mount a proper exhibit dedicated to Trump\u2019s historical ignorance<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He has dismantled the civil rights division of the justice department. Seventy per cent<\/a> of its attorneys have been fired or driven to resign. His administration has planned to close<\/a> the Community Relations Service, a unit created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to mediate racial tensions. He has withdrawn from numerous justice department lawsuits<\/a> challenging voter suppression laws.<\/p>\n

He has issued an executive order to prevent federal agencies from enforcing regulations forbidding \u201cdisparate impact<\/a>\u201d discrimination. He has attacked grants, contracts and programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), with his justice department creating<\/a> an Orwellian-named \u201ccivil rights fraud initiative\u201d to target what his agents choose to define as illegal DEI practices, and use it to leverage control over universities, law firms and private businesses.<\/p>\n

Perhaps no official presidential statement exemplifies Trump\u2019s adherence to the \u201clost cause\u201d mythology more flagrantly than his veto of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020, which included the creation of the National Naming Commission<\/a> to remove names honoring the Confederacy from nine federal military forts and thousands of other assets. \u201cI have been clear in my opposition to politically motivated attempts like this to wash away history and to dishonor the immense progress our country has fought for in realizing our founding principles,\u201d Trump stated<\/a>. The House and the Senate overwhelmingly overrode his veto.<\/p>\n

Once Trump reassumed office, he authorized wiping away the new names, some of them of Black soldiers, and reinstated the old last names of Confederate generals at the forts but with the cynical twist of claiming they were really for different people<\/a> with the same names.<\/p>\n

The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who called the National Naming Commission \u201cwoke lemmings\u201d and its changes \u201cgarbage\u201d, said<\/a>: \u201cUnlike the left, we recognize our history, we don\u2019t erase it.\u201d He announced the return of the Confederate memorial<\/a> at the Arlington national cemetery, whose frieze depicts a faithful enslaved woman taking care<\/a> of a Confederate soldier\u2019s child as he marches off to battle. In the West Point library, the Pentagon has rehung<\/a> the 20ft-tall portrait of Robert E Lee in his gray Confederate uniform with a faithful enslaved person tending his horse, Traveller, in the background.<\/p>\n

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Trump\u2019s vision of restored \u201cAmericanism\u201d might be found in the preserved \u201clost cause\u201d wing of the Virginia Museum of History in Richmond, an exhibit originally constructed in 1921 by the Confederate Memorial Association, with huge murals of Lee and Stonewall Jackson as gallant cavaliers. The eulogizing of \u201cthe Four Seasons of the Confederacy\u201d is now reframed with contemporary texts to explain the post-civil war romanticizing of the slave republic.<\/p>\n

The exhibit also features a widely circulated \u201clost cause\u201d pamphlet<\/a> published by the United Confederate Veterans in 1919 that urged southern school districts: \u201cReject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves \u2026 Reject a book that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis.\u201d<\/p>\n

For perspective, around the corner from this exhibit, the Virginia Museum of History has stationed the white hood and sheet of a Ku Klux Klansman. In 2020 and 2021, the row of five towering Confederate statues along Richmond\u2019s Monument Avenue of Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, and Matthew Fontaine Maury, erected as \u201clost cause\u201d icons during the Jim Crow era, were removed.<\/p>\n

In the interest of \u201cRestoring Truth and Sanity to American History\u201d, the Smithsonian would do well to mount a proper exhibit dedicated to Trump\u2019s historical ignorance and his \u201cdivisive race-centered ideology\u201d.<\/p>\n

The exhibit could begin with a kind of preface, posting the remarks of Trump\u2019s chief of staff in his first administration, the former marine general John Kelly, who revealed Trump to be the ignoramus-in-chief. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t know any history at all, even some of the basics on the US,\u201d Kelly said<\/a>. Trump reportedly told Kelly that Adolf Hitler \u201cdid a lot of good things\u201d. He also reportedly said<\/a> he needed \u201cthe kind of generals that Hitler had\u201d, people \u201cwho were totally loyal to him, that follow orders\u201d. (Trump representatives deny he made the remarks.)<\/p>\n

Kelly described the conversation to Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic<\/a>: \u201c\u2018Do you mean Bismarck\u2019s generals?\u2019\u201d Kelly asked. \u201c\u2018Do you mean the Kaiser\u2019s generals? Surely you can\u2019t mean Hitler\u2019s generals?\u2019 And he said, \u2018Yeah, yeah, Hitler\u2019s generals.\u2019\u201d Trump asked Kelly who the \u201cgood guys\u201d were in the first world war.<\/p>\n

Then the exhibit might move on to President William McKinley, whom Trump lately has invoked<\/a> as the \u201ctariff king\u201d to justify his own tariffs, largely ruled illegal so far by the courts. Trump seems to care about no other aspect of McKinley or his presidency \u2013 say, the Spanish-American War \u2013 while he has revived his memory by removing the Native American name of Mount Denali in Alaska and renaming it Mount McKinley. Trump has ignored McKinley\u2019s second thoughts about tariffs, including his final speech before his assassination in 1901, in which he abjured severe tariffs. But how would Trump know that?<\/p>\n

Next the exhibit would devote ample space to Trump\u2019s relationship to Abraham Lincoln, the one president Trump has discussed more than any other. In 2018, as Trump\u2019s poll ratings dived, he tweeted<\/a>: \u201cWow, highest Poll Numbers in the history of the Republican Party. That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.\u201d Of course, there were no polls in Lincoln\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

In 2019, Trump stated<\/a>: \u201cThe radical Democrats want to destroy America as we know it \u2026 Abraham Lincoln could not win Texas under those circumstances.\u201d In fact, Lincoln\u2019s name was kept off the ballot in Texas in the 1860 election and, of course, in 1864 when Texas was part of the Confederacy. In 2020, staging an interview<\/a> with Fox News within the Lincoln Memorial, Trump used Lincoln as a prop to elevate himself as a greater martyr. \u201cThey always said, \u2018Lincoln, nobody got treated worse than Lincoln.\u2019 I believe I am treated worse.\u201d He apparently had forgotten Lincoln\u2019s assassination.<\/p>\n

On the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, in 2024, he appeared to blame Lincoln for the civil war. \u201cSo many mistakes were made,\u201d Trump said<\/a>. \u201cSee, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster \u2026 Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn\u2019t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.\u201d Of course, Lincoln held out an olive branch in his first inaugural address, appealing to the \u201cmystic chords of memory\u201d and \u201cthe better angels of our nature\u201d, which was met a month later with the firing on Fort Sumter. But in Trump\u2019s view he had failed the art of the deal. He was the 19th century\u2019s Zelenskyy.<\/p>\n

Then the exhibit would come to Robert E Lee. In the aftermath of the neo-Nazi rally at Charlottesville in 2017 in which 35 people were injured and a young woman was murdered, about which Trump infamously said there were \u201csome very fine people on both sides\u201d, he defended<\/a> Confederate monuments against a protest to remove a statue of Lee that had been erected as a tribute to the \u201clost cause\u201d. \u201cSad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,\u201d he tweeted<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo,\u201d he said<\/a> at a rally in 2018, \u201cRobert E Lee was a great general and Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia, he couldn\u2019t beat Robert E Lee. He was going crazy \u2026 but Robert E Lee was winning battle after battle after battle and Abraham Lincoln came home and he said, \u2018I can\u2019t beat Robert E Lee.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Lincoln had a clear and firm opinion about Lee. He considered him a traitor. Naming Lee high among officers of the army who had betrayed their oath to the United States, Lincoln wrote<\/a> on 12 June 1863 that they were \u201cnow occupying the very highest places in the rebel war service, were all within the power of the government since the rebellion began, and were nearly as well known to be traitors then as now\u201d. Lincoln wrote: \u201cI think the time not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed\u201d for not having arrested Lee and the others when their treasonous intent was known before they had joined the Confederacy to lead an armed insurrection against the United States.<\/p>\n

Of course, there is a memorial on the estate overlooking Washington where Lee lived before the war. Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who had been a West Point classmate and friend of Lee, declared those grounds the Arlington national cemetery in 1864, planting the first graves of fallen soldiers in the rose garden as close to the house as possible, to ensure that Lee would never return.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Of all the presidents, Donald Trump \u2013 the man who would remake the Smithsonian and alter its presentation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-397741","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-united-states","9":"tag-us","10":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115147081150547065","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}