The president seeking to overhaul the Smithsonian has a dark vision of the past that he’s using to advance his agenda
O
f all the presidents, Donald Trump – the man who would remake the Smithsonian and alter its presentation of “how bad slavery was”, as he put it – is surely the most ignorant of American history itself.
What Trump doesn’t know fills the Library of Congress, whose chief librarian he has fired, along with driving out the heads of the National Archives and the National Portrait Gallery, as well as dissolving programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities and defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which as a result has paused the acclaimed American Experience documentary series.
Trump claims he is tearing down the entire federal support for history in order to reveal the true story. In his executive order of 27 March, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, he stated: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” The “improper ideology” that needs to be extirpated is a “divisive, race-centered ideology”.
