Rewriting history one museum at a time

It’s hard to put history into context while you’re living it. Amidst the brazen public corruption, the rank incompetence and needless cruelty of the current administration it’s good to take a breath and remind yourself that like all things, Trump too shall pass. This is merely a moment in time, albeit a dark one, and progress is never a straight line. Barack Obama, one of many presidents who weren’t a national embarrassment, liked to paraphrase a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quote about the arc of the moral universe being long but ultimately bending toward justice, think about that the next time a turmeric colored conman tries to sell you crypto.

Try as they might Trump and his basket of deplorables can’t rewrite history, at least not in the long term. He can use his power and petty tyrant tactics to put signs up around the Smithsonian telling you not to believe your lying eyes, but I’m not sure they’re going to have the desired effect as patrons are looking at literal physical evidence of the history the president is trying to deny. Challenging the intellectual authority of The Smithsonian Institution is targeted at a very specific demographic, and as a general rule they don’t maintain museum memberships.

Historically speaking, Trump’s fate is already sealed. He’s destined to be lumped with James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding (the only president hornier than Trump), Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson at the bottom of C-Span’s presidential rankings in perpetuity. In fact, he already is. It’s quite the accomplishment because the surveys of academics and historians don’t typically bother ranking a president until he’s out of office for a term. Trump has been so bad a bunch of dusty nerds with tweed elbow patches felt comfortable placing him in the bottom quartile before the halfway point of his second term. These are the guys that will ultimately write history, not Donald Trump.