Memory Wars:

Trump is Coming For Our History

I realize many of you prefer not to look at original source Trump communications, but I really need you to read this:

Donald Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian —claiming the museums are “OUT OF CONTROL” because they highlight slavery and injustice—might sound like another throwaway rant. But it’s not. It’s part of a larger authoritarian project: the control of memory itself.

Trump isn’t just fighting over budgets or monuments. He’s fighting to dictate what Americans believe about their past and present. And disturbingly, he’s already proven he knows how to win that kind of fight. With “history” we all watched live. On TV.

The Smithsonian as a Battlefield

The Smithsonian rant frames museums as the “last remaining segment of WOKE,” where history is allegedly distorted to make America look bad. Notice what Trump does here: he sets up a binary where telling the truth about slavery, Jim Crow, or systemic racism becomes unpatriotic. To acknowledge America’s sins is, in his framing, to hate America. He wants the Smithsonian to tell a story of unbroken triumph—bright futures, relentless success, American exceptionalism.

It’s not subtle: he even says he’s sending his lawyers to “go through the museums,” just as they’ve done with universities. This is authoritarian memory politics in action: purging cultural institutions of dissenting narratives, ensuring that future generations encounter only a pre-approved, sanitized story of the nation.

Weaponizing Outliers

Now, does Trump have raw material to work with? Unfortunately, yes. Look at the infamous “Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness” poster once hosted by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Somehow. It listed things like punctuality, hard work, nuclear families, and rational thought as “whiteness.”

It makes science, hard work, and family values sound like racialized traits, not universal human ones. It essentializes culture in a way that insults both white and Black Americans. And most importantly: it’s tailor-made propaganda for Rufo, Miller, and Trump to exploit.

This one cringe poster allows Trump to paint all museums as radical indoctrination centers. He doesn’t need to show balance, nuance, or the reality that our museums are historically accurate. He just needs this one absurd example to point to and say: See? They hate you. They’re calling punctuality racist. They’re teaching your kids America is evil. It’s the authoritarian trick of taking an outlier and inflating it into the norm.

January 6th: Proof of Concept

If this sounds alarmist, remember: Trump has already pulled this off—spectacularly—with January 6th.

In the days after the attack, polls showed a majority of Republicans were troubled by it. Many said it was unacceptable, a threat to democracy. But over the course of four years, Trump steadily rewrote the narrative. Through constant repetition—“it was a peaceful protest,” “patriots,” “witch hunt prosecutions”—he shifted Republican opinion.

By 2025, many GOP voters describe January 6th as nothing more than a protest that got out of hand. The bear-sprayers, the men who beat police officers, the white nationalist plotters—Trump pardoned them without consequence. No blowback, no reckoning. What was once a violent insurrection is now, in Republican memory, practically a field trip gone sideways. That’s not just spin. That’s victory in the memory wars.

The Greatest Economy Ever

He used the same strategy with the economy. Trump’s presidency was not the greatest economic era in American history—not by any measure. But he repeated that phrase constantly: the greatest economy ever. Every rally, every tweet, every press conference. And now? Ask random Americans what they remember about Trump’s tenure, and you’ll hear it: didn’t he have a good economy?

That’s not fact. That’s memory manipulation. The raw power of repetition, drilled into the public consciousness until myth becomes “common sense.”

Why It Works in America

This works because America is civically illiterate. Most Americans can’t name their representatives, much less explain Reconstruction or the Electoral College. We don’t know our history, and we don’t want to. That vacuum is easy to fill with slogans.

Trump understands this instinctively. Tell people something is a “witch hunt” long enough, and it becomes a witch hunt. Tell them “WOKE IS BROKE” often enough, and they’ll start to believe that teaching about slavery or Jim Crow is an attack on the nation itself.

Museums as the Next Front

That’s why the Smithsonian rant matters. Trump is also coming for the universities. He already rewrote January 6th. He already installed “greatest economy ever” into the public memory. Museums are just the next frontier.

By targeting institutions of collective memory—universities, museums, even monuments—Trump seeks to ensure that the only history future Americans inherit is his history. Not the messy truth. Not the contradictions. Not the shame and the progress side by side. Just the triumphalist myth of an infallible America, persecuted only by elites, redeemed only by him.

The Stakes of the Memory War

This is why the memory wars matter. They’re not about academic squabbles or partisan talking points. They’re about who controls the story of America. And in politics, whoever controls the story controls the future.

The fight over the Smithsonian isn’t about museum curation. It’s about whether the next generation of Americans will be allowed to know that slavery was real, that racism shaped our institutions, that democracy can be fragile. Or whether they’ll be told only that America is the “hottest country in the world” and that to say otherwise is unpatriotic.

Trump has already proven he can rewrite the past in real time. January 6th was his test case, and he won. Now he’s coming for history itself.

And unless Democrats understand that, unless they fight not just with facts but with narrative, they’ll keep losing these wars—until America’s past, and its future, belong entirely to him.