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I was listening to The Week in Art podcast this evening, as I prepared dinner. It was the first episode since their summer hiatus and was a recap of things that had happened during the break. Possibly the biggest story concerned the Trump administrations attempt to change history.
It seems that the current incumbent wants signage erected around the Smithsonian warning people about the inaccuracies in the museum. This follows a rather odd and inaccurate report, written to right the wrongs perpetrated by museum professionals, historians and other well-educated people. A report that, incidentally, contradicts itself.
Trump’s Domestic Policy Council also directly contradicts itself at times. “NMAH’s only special programming to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary, In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness, fails to celebrate America’s Founders and the American Founding,” the report claims. But the following sentence admits that the exhibition “highlights 250 objects from the museum’s collections, including remarkable artifacts like the desk Thomas Jefferson used to draft the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s uniform, a ship of the early U.S. Navy, and, of course, the Star-Spangled Banner, the 1813 flag that inspired the National Anthem.”
Stein, Marc, 2026, Time Magazine online at: https://time.com/article/2026/07/08/trump-s-attacks-on-the-smithsonian-are-an-attack-on-american-history/
Trumpians want the museum to show a more conservative history rather than the real one. In other words, the white, pseudo Christian, pathetic old men want history told the way they want it rather than the way it actually happened. They want the US to be more 1984 than 2026. The inaccurate past is somewhere they pine for.
Not that far from what Winston Smith was doing at the Ministry of Truth.
So, my question has to be, why did any Native Americans, Latinos, anyone identifying as LGBTQ+, women, African Americans, and, basically, anyone NOT old, white and male, vote for their own exclusion from US history? What was it that they thought was being achieved by electing an administration that hates them and would rather they were gone?
I mean, some of them must have voted for this monstrous pile of lies. Otherwise, it would appear that elections are decided by the self same people who want to rewrite the past in favour of the lies they tell themselves.
Another question I have often asked leaps to mind: When was America great before? For real, I mean, not in the imaginary past apparently preferred by the Republican Party.
