Donald Trump is an enigma in at least one sense. He’s not a very well educated man, nor is he overly bright. According to what college records have become available, he can easily be characterized as barely average in educational intelligence. He does have the gift of gab, and he apparently has an unshakable belief in himself—and in his ability to sell himself to the public no matter what flaws the public perceives in him. He has regularly been called a successful carnival barker who has mastered the art of convincing enough people that, ‘okay, the flying elephant is not real, but stay right here and let me show you something else you’ll like.’
As of now, Mr. Trump is also a certified member of the “Lost History” club—a group of people dedicated to lying, re-writing and re-telling a history that never happened that way. The kind who’ve even now continued to say that the South never really lost the Civil War, that information to the contrary was all misinformation and gossip spread by escaping slaves.
We have to wonder, sometimes, how some people actually get by every day that way. Unfortunately, he has done a lot better than to merely get by—he and a bevy of his confederates have figured out how to get him into the White House twice. That particular history is going to be hard for the U.S. to live down, if it ever can.
True to his inclinations, Mr. Trump and his cohorts have not only launched heavy-hitting attacks on esteemed American institutions like Harvard, Princeton and Columbia Universities in the name of punishing an anti-semitism culture on those campuses, which the Trumpsters can only claim but not prove. But in his arc, namecalling and hiding in an alley is usually good enough to cause the desired confusion.
In March he and his cronies also launched an attack on the world-famous Smithsonian Institution of Libraries and Museums, including the signature African American Museum of History and Culture, which has so carefully collected, arranged and presented the essence of African American history to its visitors. The Trumpsters have accused the Museum of racism and attempting to belittle White Southern culture. They have demanded that the Museum take down several of its exhibits and substantially change many others that they perceive insult white people. They removed, for example, the 1880 edition of George Washington Williams’ “The History of the Negro,” the first known book of its kind, several of the monuments from the civil rights struggle in the American South, such as the lunch counter from the first Black student sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, etc.
Critics have said this is an overt attempt to “whitewash the African American history experience.” More removals of artifacts and historical materials are being done currently.
But as Dr. W.E.B. Dubois demonstrated concretely in his classic text, “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880,” the “Lost Cause Thesis” was a lie. Hiding the facts of Black involvement in American history—the good and the bad—would do no good. What happened is what happened, and trying to re-write that history away was not going to work well. The South did start and it actually lost the Civil War. Formal slavery was ended, Black Americans thought they were promised farmland to use to build new lives, and later found that that was not true. Those facts cannot be changed because of the political authority of succeeding generations of Americans.
The Trump administration may very well be good at selling hokum to the American public and to the world, but its attempt to control the historical narrative of times past and even times to come, will not work.
Better men and administrators than Mr. Trump have tried to commandeer and falsify historical records and lists of peoples’ accomplishments, and they have failed. As will he. He and his ilk cannot control the historical narrative, and he himself will go down as another charlatan who tried and failed to do so.
Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). It is the stepparent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.