Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian is a crime against history

In his landmark essay “The Souls of White Folk” published in 1910, W.E.B. Du Bois eerily previewed President Donald Trump’s appeal and rise to power. “This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts,” he wrote. “How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to make children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white man’s soul; that every great thought the world ever knew was a white man’s thought; that every great deed the world ever did was a white man’s deed; that every great dream the world ever sang was a white man’s dream.”

Forty-six of our 47 presidents have been white. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Trump is America’s first White president. His power in that role is growing; it is inseparable from his authoritarian revolutionary project to remake American society in the image of his MAGA movement. With each passing day of his second term in office, Trump is growing even more bold and confident in his plans to rewrite the nation’s history, public memory and reality to fit his obscene vision.

His campaign to “restore truth and sanity to American history,” as he put it in an executive order issued in March that targeted the country’s “public monuments, memorials, statues [and] markers,” is escalating.

On Aug. 19, after apparent pressure from the administration led the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to remove and then reinstate references to Trump’s two impeachments in an exhibition, the president put the institution squarely in his crosshairs in a Truth Social post:

The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.

He intensified his attacks again two days later when the White House posted an article aimed at seven Smithsonian museums — the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of African Art, the American Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum — for not being in compliance with Trump’s White restoration project.

As Michelle Young highlighted at The Forward, both the attack and language recalled the Nazis’ takeover of German society in the 1930s. She found this “link” especially chilling when placed in context with some of the president’s previous comments, which included writing that “a lot of modern art is a con” in his famous book “The Art of the Deal.”

“In 2016,” Young wrote, “he said of modern art shown in a Brooklyn Museum exhibition that ‘it’s not art. It’s absolutely gross, degenerate stuff.’ His use of the word ‘degenerate’ was particularly significant. ‘Degenerate art’ — or, in German, ‘entartete kunst’ — was a term coined by the Nazi Party in the 1920s to describe modern art, which was seen as antithetical to the Nazi project.”

Some of the art singled out by Trump as being “unpatriotic” and “woke” included Rigoberto A. González’s 2022 painting “Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas,” a portrait of a Black transgender Statue of Liberty by Amy Sherald, a drawing of brown migrants watching Fourth of July fireworks from the other side of the wall in Mexico and a papier-mâché Statue of Liberty where Lady Liberty is holding tomatoes — ostensibly to throw in protest — instead of a torch.

The president’s assault on the Smithsonian is serious. But his whitewashing campaign — or, more precisely, his White racial erasure project — does not exist in a vacuum. It extends far beyond the Smithsonian.

We are witnessing a thought-crime regime that is taking control of the country’s intellectual history and collective memory, which have been deemed “woke.” This includes higher education, with a particular focus on elite colleges and universities; rewriting history textbooks and other educational materials; destroying public media such as PBS and NPR; restoring Confederate monuments; removing the historical context of public parks and other spaces and their connections to the color line; cutting federal funding for scientific and health research that benefits marginalized communities, including women; and ordering the Pentagon to purge officers and other leaders who are not white men, and remove the names and contributions of African-American and other nonwhite veterans — as well as women and LGBTQ Americans — from its libraries, website, reference materials, bases and ships.

In Trump’s whitewashed version of American history, White on Black chattel slavery was a happy and benevolent institution that benefited the enslaved because it “civilized” them through Christianity. The American Civil War was “the War of Northern Aggression” and not a fight to end slavery. Manifest Destiny and Western Expansion did not involve land theft and the genocide of First Nations peoples.

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In all, this represents one dimension of an Orwellian project, a Ministry of Truth, that engages in intellectual violence where politically inconvenient, and challenging ideas, concepts, facts and knowledge — and people and groups — are disappeared both literally and symbolically. This includes the unperson laws targeting the LGBTQ community, as well as Trump’s mass deportation campaign to remove millions of “illegal aliens” and other “undesirables” who are deemed to be “poison” in “the blood” of the nation.

“Racism fuels [this] cleansing project of authoritarianism,” said Henry A. Giroux, a prominent social theorist. “Under the Trump administration, culture is not merely a reflection of political power but the very terrain on which authoritarianism takes root, creates its subjects and legitimates the warfare state. Trump’s regime deploys cultural engineering as a weapon, determining what is remembered, what is erased and which values are elevated. The aim is not only to control politics but to colonize consciousness, to fashion a population that internalizes obedience, fear and amnesia. This is the logic of pedagogical terrorism: A cultural and educational apparatus that normalizes coercion, erasure and dehumanization by teaching people to accept them as common sense.”

Trump, Giroux noted, is “[weaponizing] culture as…a tool of domination.”

All of this leads to the following question: What is the point of even having museums — or libraries, universities, schools and other institutions of learning — if they are filled with lies and omissions? Do lie-filled Smithsonian museums in service to Trumpism and American authoritarianism do more harm than having no such museums at all?

Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, explained that Trump’s attacks on the Smithsonian — and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in particular — are “not just revisionist history, it’s modern-day racism.” They are attempts, he said, to rob the American people of the knowledge and lessons taught by the long Black Freedom Struggle and history of Black Americans as warriors for democracy.

“These efforts are a direct assault on the truth and an attempt to erase the lived experiences of Black people,” Hewitt said. “The fight for civil rights has always required endurance, and this moment underlines the need for it. The progress under attack today represents the fruits of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The progress achieved [then] can be traced back decades prior to the Reconstruction era. This continuum is critical because racial injustice didn’t end with the abolition of slavery or with the passage of civil rights laws. Racism is a shapeshifter; it evolves and adapts to challenge every piece of progress hard-won.”

Knowledge is power. Fascists, authoritarians and demagogues of various ilk know this intimately. History, culture and politics are rivers that flow and merge with one another. George Orwell knew that he who controls the past also controls the present and the future — and Trump, along with his right-wing allies, have internalized these lessons as well. They deftly apply them every day, relentlessly.

W.E.B. Du Bois famously observed that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” In the 21st century, Trumpism and the global anti-democracy project are a reminder that Du Bois’ wisdom and warning continue to be true — and that racism remains a dagger at the heart of American democracy.