What did Donald Trump do today?

He lashed out at "museums" in general, but especially the Smithsonian Institution, for talking about "how bad Slavery was."

 

This was an actual post to his private microblogging website.   

This is not the only time in recent weeks that Trump, who explicitly aligned himself with white nationalist organizations during his first term in office, has tried to soft-pedal the horror of slavery. In place of the now-defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which developed Sesame Street and countless other children's shows, Trump has promoted PragerU, a right-wing producer of "educational" videos. Among their work are AI-generated cartoons of historical figures like Christopher Columbus claim that slavery was "no big deal." They also produce a video in which a cartoon Frederick Douglass says that slavery was a worthwhile "compromise" in which enslaved Black Americans were willing to sacrifice their freedom for the good of the United States.

It's not very likely Trump cares much about the culture war he's stoking by minimizing "how bad Slavery was," his long history of overt racism aside. But his anger at the Smithsonian is almost certainly real, because it publicly acknowledged the fact that he has been impeached twice. Earlier this summer, Trump succeeded in forcing the Smithsonian to remove an exhibit in the National Museum of American History dealing with presidential impeachments (all of them, not just Trump's two). When it was replaced, the language was softened, and text related to Trump's impeachment over attempting to blackmail Ukraine into providing fake dirt on his political rival Joe Biden, and his fomenting of the attack on Congress after the 2020 election, was moved to a less visible spot.

Presenting a sanitized history of a nation's glorious past—and punishing anyone who questions it—is a core element of fascism. Presenting an image of the state as perfect makes it harder to criticize the leader. But in the case of historical evils like concentration camps, nativism, colonialism, forced labor, eugenics, racism, science denialism, religious intolerance, propaganda, or xenophobia—things virtually nobody would want to advertise as good things—a deliberate erasure of history makes it harder to tell when authoritarian governments are backsliding towards them.

Why does this matter? 

• Even by Trump's standards, complaining about teaching that slavery was bad is some astonishingly evil shit.