Complex questions echo after a reference to Trump's impeachments is removed from a history museum

Politico

2 days ago

In China, for example, references to the June 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square are forbidden and meticulously regulated by the ruling Communist Party government. In Soviet-era Russia, officials who ran afoul of leaders like Josef Stalin disappeared not only from the government itself but from photographs and history books where they once appeared.
Jason Stanley, an expert on authoritarianism, said controlling what and how people learn of their past has long been used as a vital tool to maintain power. Stanley has made his views about the Trump administration clear; he recently left Yale University to join the University of Toronto, citing concerns over the U.S. political situation.
'If they don't control the historical narrative,' he said, 'then they can't create the kind of fake history that props up their politics.'
It shows how the presentation of history matters: In the United States, presidents and their families have always used their power to shape history and calibrate their own images. Jackie Kennedy insisted on cuts in William Manchester's book on her husband's 1963 assassination, 'The Death of a President.' Ronald Reagan and his wife got a cable TV channel to release a carefully calibrated documentary about him. Those around Franklin D. Roosevelt, including journalists of the era, took pains to mask the impact that paralysis had on his body and his mobility.
Trump, though, has taken it to a more intense level — a sitting president encouraging an atmosphere where institutions can feel compelled to choose between him and the truth — whether he calls for it directly or not.
'We are constantly trying to position ourselves in history as citizens, as citizens of the country, citizens of the world,' said Robin Wagner-Pacifici, professor emerita of sociology at the New School for Social Research. 'So part of these exhibits and monuments are also about situating us in time. And without it, it's very hard for us to situate ourselves in history because it seems like we just kind of burst forth from the Earth.'
Timothy Naftali, director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum from 2007 to 2011, presided over its overhaul to offer a more objective presentation of Watergate — one not beholden to the president's loyalists. In an interview Friday, he said he was 'concerned and disappointed' about the Smithsonian decision. Naftali, now a senior researcher at Columbia University, said museum directors 'should have red lines' and that he considered removing the Trump panel to be one of them.
While it might seem inconsequential for someone in power to care about a museum's offerings, Wagner-Pacifici says Trump's outlook on history and his role in it — earlier this year, he said the Smithsonian had 'come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology' — shows how important those matters are to people in authority.
'You might say about that person, whoever that person is, their power is so immense and their legitimacy is so stable and so sort of monumental that why would they bother with things like this ... why would they bother to waste their energy and effort on that?' Wagner-Pacifici said. Her conclusion: 'The legitimacy of those in power has to be reconstituted constantly. They can never rest on their laurels.'