After running the three most overtly racist presidential campaigns since George Wallace in 1968, Donald Trump is giving “White House” new meaning.
When he says he’ll “Make America Great Again,” he means “Make America White Again.” Now the 45th and 47th president aims to make American history white again as well.
The Yankee George Wallace’s recent executive order charges the Smithsonian Institution with promoting “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
Trump’s order stops Uncle Sam from spending any more tax dollars on Smithsonian “exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.”
In Trump History 101:
- Blacks were happy, or at least contented, in bondage, until Yankee abolitionists “stirred them up.”
- Slavery had little to do with the civil war.
- Blacks were fine with Jim Crow until “outside Communist agitators” arrived in Dixie.
- White folks killed some Indians and stole their land, but in the end, did them a big favor by Christianizing and civilizing them.
- Women were happy as homemakers and helpmeets and didn’t really want to be liberated.
- LGBTQ folks were cool with staying in the closet.
- Immigrants, especially those of color, were always welcome in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Trump titled his decree “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” prompting The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins to observe, “We are now in Ministry of Truth territory.” (Irony is often lost on the less introspective. “Ministry of Truth” is the propaganda agency in George Orwell’s 1984.)
“Propagandizing and perverting history is what authoritarians do,” said Dr. Brian Clardy, a Murray State University history professor. “Benito Mussolini did it in the 1920s in Italy. Adolf Hitler did it in Germany in the 1930s.”
Likewise, he said, torturing history was SOP in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. History is still sanitized in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and in every other dictatorship, past and present, far right or far left.
Higgins called Trump’s order “deeply shocking, but predictable.” Clardy agrees. “What the president did was offensive but predictable.”
Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian followed his crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“Racism has long been an axis of Trump’s national project, and a space where the president’s own long-held racist beliefs mingle with those of his heterodox group of backers,” wrote Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in her book Strongmen. “These include Confederate flag-waving Southerners, who never accepted the end of segregation, and GOP politicians who fear immigration will cause ‘the browning of America.’”
She added: “Muslims, Latinos, African-Americans, and other people of color have been the targets of the Trump administration plan to remake American society in the image of White nationalism.”
Higgins cited the line in Trump’s order which boils down to “our nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.” She also wrote, “How much easier it is to sink into this pillowy, comforting notion of glorious progress than to grapple with the kind of knotty, often upsetting, and confronting history that the [Smithsonian] Museum of African-American history offers its visitors. But it makes me wonder: Can the museum survive this government?”
A slew of academic organizations and individual scholars like Clardy have rightly and roundly condemned Trump’s order.
In a joint statement, the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians denounced Trump’s “recent efforts to censor historical content on federal government websites, at many public museums, and across a wide swath of government resources that include essential data. New policies that purge words, phrases, and content that some officials deem suspect on ideological grounds constitute a systemic campaign to distort, manipulate, and erase significant parts of the historical record. Recent directives insidiously prioritize narrow ideology over historical research, historical accuracy, and the actual experiences of Americans.”
So far 36 academic organizations have cosigned the AHA-NOAH statement.
Warned the AHA-NOAH: “Words matter. Precision matters. Context matters. Expertise matters. Democracy matters. We can neither deny what happened nor invent things that did not happen. Recent executive orders and other federal directives alter the public record in ways that are contrary to historical evidence. They result in deceitful narratives of the past that violate the professional standards of our discipline. When government entities, or scholars themselves, censor the use of particular words, they in effect censor historical evidence. Censorship and distortion erase people and institutions from history.”
The joint AHA-OAH statement also says, “At this writing, the full range of historical distortions and deletions is yet to be discerned.”
This historian regrettably doubts that condemnation from the kind of folks Wallace scorned as “pseudo-intellectual” will stay Trump from trying to make America white again. Clardy is skeptical too.
Most of the Maga faithful are still loyal to their Great White Hope. In our neck of the deep Western Kentucky woods, “Trump 2024” flags still flutter – if a little faded and windblown. So far there’s been no outrage from the Maga GOP over Trump bringing 1984 to 2025, but Trump’s dictator envy is clearly discernible.
“The idea of the strong man who brings his nation to greatness is a foundation of authoritarian history,” Ben Giat wrote.
“Authoritarians hold appeal when society is polarized, or divided into two opposing ideological camps, which is why they do all they can do to exacerbate strife. Periods of progress in gender, labor, or racial emancipation have also been fertile terrain for openly racist and sexist aspirants to office, who soothe fears of the loss of male domination and class privilege and the end of White Christian civilization. … The decay of truth and democratic disillusion proceed hand in hand, starting with the insurgent’s assertion that the establishment media delivers false or biased information while he speaks the truth and risks everything to get the ‘real facts’ out. Once his supporters bond to his person, they stop caring about his falsehoods. They believe him because they believe in him.”
--30--
