I’m going bold today. I know it’s risky to broadcast certain beliefs in the midst of the Trump Restoration and its assault on history, but I’m just going to say it anyway, because, dammit, it’s time to take a stand.
Here goes (and if this means that I’m on the way to what’s left of Alligator Alcatraz, so be it):
Slavery was, uh, bad.
There, I’ve said it. And not just bad. Slavery was really, really bad. Godawful bad. Morally and ethically and every-other-wayically bad. As John Quincy Adams — one of our pre-WOKE presidents — wrote in the early 19th century, chattel slavery was “a great and foul stain” on our nation.
Yeah, that bad — extending to the point where bad is not just bad, but indisputably evil.
Evil enough that we had to fight a whole Civil War to rid ourselves of centuries of legally sanctioned inhumanity to our fellow humans.
Evil enough that John Quincy’s wife, Louisa, wrote to her father-in-law John Adams — another pre-WOKE president — that slavery “is so palpable a stain that the veryist dunce can see it and understand it.”
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Reading her quote nearly 200 years later, she’s probably right. At this point, even the veryist dunce can understand it.
The reason I bring this up, of course, is that in our Veryist Dunce in Chief’s latest broadside against the Smithsonian, Donald Trump complains that the museums are constantly reminding us “how bad slavery was.”
So it’s not just slavery, then, that Trump is upset about.
What gets to him is talking about slavery. Trump is apparently in the enough-already camp on slavery and on Jim Crow and on the courageous battle that played out in my lifetime for civil rights and voting rights.
I don’t know what Trump’s personal views are on the slave issue — I’m assuming he believes there were very fine people on both sides — but here’s the money quote from Trump’s social media post on slavery and history and what the proper role of museums should be:
“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.”
There it is. What Trump wants from our museums is propaganda — not history. He wants the Smithsonian, which gets about 60% of its funding from Congress, to talk about how HOT we are under our, uh, hottie of a president and not about actual problems we faced in the past. Because then we might be tempted to talk about the problems we face today.
As many readers might guess, this is the stage of the column where I must inevitably turn to George Orwell, whom I’ve heard good things about, to explain why it’s so important to someone like a wannabe dictator like Trump to rewrite and whitewash history — especially Black and brown and women’s history in a time when the elimination of DEI programs and the promotion of “white male grievances” are core MAGA principles.
From Orwell’s “1984”: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
What would the veryist dunce make of this quote? I assume he gets it, or much of it anyway. That’s why Trump is threatening Colorado officials unless Tina Peters, the disgraced former Mesa County clerk, is released from prison “RIGHT NOW.”
Peters was convicted by a jury of her peers, you’ll recall, on four felony counts related to voting-machine data tampering and was sentenced to nine years. So what was Trump’s revisionist interpretation of Peters’ absurdist plot to help the Pillow Guy overthrow American democracy?
He called Peters a “brave and innocent Patriot who is being tortured by Crooked Colorado politicians.” He added that she “did nothing wrong, except catching the Democrats cheat in the Election … If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!”
Orwell would have loved this: In Trump’s version of history, Peters is guilty only of trying to identify the bad guys, who just happen to be the guys Trump has accused of rigging the 2020 election, which — as any historian will tell you —he actually lost fairly and, you know, squarely.
What “harsh measures” is Trump contemplating? Can he postpone the opening of ski season? Can he have Nikola Jokic deported back to Serbia?
I guess the real question for Trump is: What would Vladimir Putin do?
If you take a brief trip through the Vladimir Putin authoritarian playbook, in which we see the rehabilitation of Stalin (not that bad a guy), of the Soviet Union (greatest empire in history), of crackdowns against democracy movements in the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc (OK, bad maybe, but not half as bad as the stuff America was doing), or the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that led to invasions of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union at the start of World War II (c’mon, who really wants to talk about Poland these days?).
Trump is hardly coy about his playbook.
He gleefully attempts to rewrite history. It’s all part of his plan to scrub what he calls “corrosive ideology” in matters of racism and sexism — so that he can, say, restore monuments to the Confederacy and undo the renaming of seven military bases honoring Confederate generals/traitors.
The heroes Trump has tried to erase, or at least minimize, from history mostly include Black heroes like Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, the Tuskegee Airmen. But there was sufficient blowback that Trump had to briefly retreat because everyone understood these were true American icons.
He didn’t retreat for long, though. He’s still going after history, by controlling what elite universities can teach, by what corporate media can broadcast, whom some lawyers can defend, and what words — like “oppression” and “DEI” and “trans” and “racial inequality” and “The Gulf of Mexico” — have been banned in government documents. He’s going after whatever stands in the way of promoting white male grievances.
In maybe Trump’s starkest authoritarian move, he’s brought martial law to D.C. while becoming the nation’s Crime Fighter in Chief, even though crime there is at its lowest point in 30 years. Attacking urban crime and supposedly dystopian cities has long been a GOP staple. But only Trump brings in the troops.
This time, Trump says he doesn’t believe the D.C. statistics. When stats are not to his liking, he fires the person responsible. Or, just wait, he sends the FBI after them.
His Department of Justice is investigating the D.C. police for possibly rigging the stats. He’s also threatening the D.C. mayor, Muriel Bowser, with her removal as mayor and with a “complete and total federal takeover” of the city if she doesn’t “get her act straight.” That came on the same day that Trump sent the FBI to raid his enemy and critic John Bolton’s house and office. Was it a warning? Or was it just business as usual in MAGA world?
Washington is, of course, a federal city, and Trump does have more power there, although probably not nearly as much as he’s claiming. But he’s also threatening other cities — all blue cities in blue states, mostly with Black mayors, even as he brings to Washington National Guard units from six states, all red states — with more martial law. I don’t know what will happen next — Trump is talking about sending troops to Chicago and New York — but this should serve as a warning to sandwich tossers everywhere.
When both Trump and I were kids, way back in the 1950s, my sister, then in the third grade, came home one day to announce that her teacher had said slaves didn’t have it so bad. They had a roof over their head. They got (at least occasional) meals each day. And the Bible, after all, said slavery was OK.
My parents went to the school and lambasted the teacher and the school’s principal.
What would Trump do?
Here’s a guess: I’m thinking he’d build the teacher a statue on the Washington Mall. Maybe — don’t laugh — next to one for Tina Peters.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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