Erasing history is easier than coming to terms with it

How the Trump vision for public history and culture is exactly what George Orwell predicted.

“Smart people don’t like me” ~ Donald Trump, September 13, 2025

I’m tired, and that’s probably what Trump and his cronies want. The constant attacks on the independence of the Smithsonian, Kennedy Center, and National Parks, affecting the presentation of American history and culture, are exhausting me just trying to keep up. I know that’s a little hyperbolic since I’m not the ones having to implement the anti-intellectual takeover of our institutions.

Sign seen supposedly near a Smithsonian building, originally posted to Instagram in August 2025.

Trump’s decrees range from the mostly inconsequential to absolutely horrific.

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico and ordering all of the various agencies to update all of the maps put out by the government is a mostly inconsequential, mostly harmless change. Yes, it removes the United States from the international norm, but that’s nothing new with Trump. It’s bombastic, narcissistic, and “America First,” but it does no substantive harm.¹

On the flip side, we have multiple cases of Trump and his ilk erasing history to serve some racist, sexist, homophobic, or fascistic revisionism. The first shot across the bow was erasing the history of trans activists from the Stonewall National Monument website, followed quickly by the erasure at the site itself. Aside from the fact that there were a significant number of trans heroes of the Stonewall Riots, there is no reason for this move beyond pure spite.

Since the almost immediate trans erasure at Stonewall, Trump has turned his attention to erasing items at national parks and the Smithsonian that acknowledge the horrors of slavery, that whitewash the very questionable lives of the Founding Fathers, and that even acknowledge that non-white people had a hand in creating America. Yale Professor Jason Stanley noted earlier this year:

…they say they’re targeting critical race theory. Critical race theory is the study of the practices that keep racial inequalities present, that are hangovers from Jim Crow, the institution — and, for example, things like mortgage redlining, school segregation, housing segregation, policing practices, that were formed when cities were intentionally segregated. So, they’re targeting Black history, they’re targeting minority history, and they’re trying to replace it explicitly with patriotic education.

Now, just imagine your cartoon vision of an authoritarian country. Imagine 1984. It’s a country — George Orwell’s book. It’s a country where students pledge allegiance to the flag every day. It’s a country where, instead of knowledge and learning, they are taught to be — they’re indoctrinated.

Now, this will be done, supposedly, under the banner of classical education. The idea is we’re going to restore classical education to end “wokeness.” But let’s look at classical education. Classical education is an education that is found — whose foundational elements are the works of the ancient philosophers and ancient history, like Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. Plato advocated removing children from their family at birth. In Plato’s Symposium, it’s normal to have relations between older male professors and their younger male students. So, the idea that classical education is there to promote Christianity and the nuclear family is simply just delusional. And it’s — as usual with this attack on schools and higher education, it’s merely an ideological facade for replacing critical inquiry with, you know, saluting the flag.

This “patriotic education” was exactly what George Orwell knew was coming in an authoritarian takeover in 1984:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

It should go without saying that this move is extremely dangerous. As they say, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Except in Trump's case, that's exactly what he wants. If he controls the narrative of history—that only the traditional (read: “non-woke”) whitewashed history is legitimate—then everything else becomes radical falsehoods being spread by those who “hate America.”

And that is what makes Trump's “smart people don't like me" comment even more transparent. Smart people don't like you, Donald, because we know what you are doing. The fact that you can say this and not have your base revolt says way more about your followers than it does anyone else… but as you so clearly pointed out, they're too dumb to realize you just called them dumb.

1. OK, yes, it could be seen as being purposely racist and demoralizing to Hispanic-Americans, especially Mexican-Americans, but I’d argue that the anti-immigrant militarization of ICE is a much more serious issue than the name of a body of water.