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The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

One of the ironies of the Felon's regime is that while it constantly uses the slogan "make America great again," the reality is that on the foreign affairs and economic stage the exact opposite is occurring. Decades old military and economic alliances are being shredded and America is being weakened - which is likely what Putin is directing the Felon to do - and the slogan seemingly really means "make America white again" as diversity, equity and inclusion policies are being banned, and non-discrimination laws are undermined or ignored, all so aggrieved whites can feel superior and have a license to discriminate.  Indeed, Project 2025's agenda is to bring back Jim Crow 2.0 and take LGBT rights back to the 1950's - the Department of Health and Human Services this week told 46 states to change parts of sex ed lessons that focus on LGBTQ+ issues. If they don’t comply in 60 days, they’ll lose federal money for the lessons. Meanwhile, on the home front, prices and inflation are increasing and international trade has been thrown into chaos - portending even more price increases - exposing the lie to the claim the Felon would lower prices. Yet the MAGA base remains loyal to their cult leader, apparently satisfied with efforts to restore white privilege and superiority under the law., respect for America dwindles.  Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman looks at the Felon's destruction of America's leadership roll in the world and the American empire: 

Last Saturday I posted a conversation with the military historian Phillips O’Brien, much of which was devoted to the war in Ukraine and what has passed for U.S. diplomacy the past few weeks. But we also talked about his new book War and Power, and I was struck by one of his points: The importance of having good allies.

 

As he noted, Germany lost both world wars in part because it was confronted by powerful alliances while its own allies were “terrible” — Austria-Hungary in World War I, Italy in World War II. He went on to say:

 

The key of the United States has been that it has maintained arguably the most successful alliance system in history since 1945. What the U.S. maintained with NATO, an alliance which kept Europe very much on the American orbit, in the American orbit, both economically and militarily, also with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and countries in Asia is, they constructed this alliance system which hugely amplified both America's economic possibilities but also its strategic possibilities.

 

And Trump is throwing all that away. . . . .[W]hat always struck me, is that the U.S. had a specialty of creating international organizations that were formally equal, where we were all partners together. Now, everybody understood that the United States was actually in charge, but we went to great lengths to make sure that the World Trade Organization or NATO were alliances of equals, at least on paper. And it was a very effective trick.

 

The Pax Americana that emerged after World War II — and basically ended on January 20, 2025 — was, in many ways, an American Empire. Even after Europe recovered from wartime devastation, the United States retained a dominant economic and military position among non-Communist nations. And we built international economic and military alliances to support a world order in effect designed to U.S. specifications.

 

But for Europe and Japan the American Empire was a subtle thing, with the United States avoiding crude displays of power and bending over backwards to avoid being explicit about its imperial status. . . . .Yet in the history of world empires, the Pax Americana nonetheless stands out for its subtlety, restraint — and effectiveness.

 

We set up the postwar international monetary system at a famous 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. It was a U.S.-centric system, although Britain also helped shape the rules. (Some guy named John Maynard Keynes played an important role.) But while the initial system did give a special role to the dollar (a role that ended in 1971) the international institutions it established, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, are, at least on paper, country-blind. Obviously they have always given special deference to U.S. concerns, but they have never been explicit instruments of U.S. power.

 

In 1947 a conference in Geneva established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which set the ground rules for, um, tariffs and trade. The GATT in turn became the foundation for the World Trade Organization, established in 1994.

 

The GATT very much set up a world trading system in America’s image — to a large extent it was a globalized version of America’s 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. But the text and the rules it sets don’t single out the U.S. for any kind of special treatment.

 

Then there were the military alliances. . . . . the closest parallel I can think of is the Delian League Athens established to confront Persia in the 5^th century BC. Athens eventually gave in to temptation and began treating its allies as subjects to be exploited; America never did. Remember, the Soviet Union repeatedly had to send in the tanks to keep puppet governments in power in Eastern Europe. Nothing like that ever happened, or even came close to happening, in NATO.

You could, I guess, say that formally treating our allies as if they were our equals was hypocritical. But I see it more as a way of showing respect and declaring that we would not abuse our national power.

 

Now, we squandered a lot of credibility by invading Iraq under false pretenses. And the credibility we lost in Iraq has made it difficult to act against atrocities elsewhere, from the use of chemical weapons in Syria to the terrible things Israel is doing in Gaza.

 

But in 2024 America was still in a real sense the leader of the free world. And while you can criticize the Biden administration for always delivering too little, too late, it nonetheless did help mobilize a large coalition to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression.

But that was another America.

 

The current occupant of the White House clearly has no use for subtlety and understatement: . . . in just 7 months Trump has completely ripped up the foundations of the Pax Americana. Almost all his tariffs are clearly in violation of the GATT, yet Trump has vandalized the world trading system as casually as he has paved over the Rose Garden. We haven’t yet had a test of whether he would honor our obligations under NATO, but he’s said that his willingness to abide by the most central obligation, the guarantee of mutual defense, “depends on your definition.”

 

Trump’s foreign policy doctrine appears to be Oderint dum metuant — let them hate as long as they fear —  supposedly the favorite motto of the Emperor Caligula. America, he seems to believe, is so powerful that it doesn’t need allies; he can bully the world into doing his bidding.

 

As Phillips O’Brien told me, history shows that such a belief is always wrong. And it’s especially wrong right now, when America is far less dominant than it once was. Whatever Trump may imagine, the world doesn’t fear us. For example, Trump may have imagined that his tariffs would bring India crawling to him, begging for relief; instead, India seems to be moving to closer ties with China.

 

In fact, not only does the world not fear us. Increasingly, it doesn’t need us. This is even true for nations that used to depend on U.S. military aid. You may remember Trump berating Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy, declaring “you don’t have the cards.” In reality, even in the Ukraine war Trump has far fewer cards than he imagines. At this point Europe is providing far more aid to Ukraine than we are . . . .

 

One of the many problems with the slogan Make America Great Again was that America already was great. Now, not so much. In a world in which America is no longer the dominant economic and military power it once was — measured by purchasing power, China’s economy is already 30 percent larger than ours — our role in world affairs depends, even more than it did in the past, on having willing allies who trust our promises. 

We used to be very good at having allies. But Trump has flushed all of that down the golden toilet.

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Putin Continues to Play the Felon

After all the media hoopla about the Alaska summit between Vladimir Putin and the Felon and Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders at the White House, other than taking the Epstein scandal out of much of the news cycle, nothing seemingly was accomplished.  At least not on the Ukraine/European perspective.  Putin has not lowered his demands and the Felon appears out of his depth - ditto for his inexperienced envoy - with Putin playing the Felon once again (assuming the Felon is not a Russian asset as Portugal's president is now stating: "the top leader of the world's foremost superpower is objectively a Soviet or Russian asset. He operates as an asset."). Moreover, Putin remains obsessed with restoring the Soviet empire, or perhaps even more the Russian Empire that included all of Ukraine and a sizable portion of Poland within its boundaries, given Putin's drive to restore imperial palaces and put up monuments to the Romanovs, including Nicholas II, while leaving out the important detail that it was Putin's predecessors who murdered Nicholas II and 17 other members of the imperial dynasty.  The other element seemingly lost on the Felon is that Putin must have some sort of "win" in Ukraine for political purposes at home since Russia has suffered significant casualties and Putin no doubt is conscious that wartime losses in both 1905 and WWI hastened the end of Imperial Russia. A piece at The Atlantic looks at where we now find ourselves:

American and European officials thought they had a real opportunity to end the war in Ukraine. President Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, flew to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin believing that a breakthrough was possible. Trump welcomed the Russian president to America, rolling out a literal red carpet. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rushed to Washington with European leaders, some of whom even sounded optimistic. Trump “broke the deadlock” with Putin, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said at the White House. “If we play this well, we could end this.”

Yet after that flurry of diplomacy, Russia has barely budged from its long-held positions on Ukraine. Putin and Zelensky have not agreed to the joint meeting promised by Trump. The fighting does not seem closer to a conclusion; today, Russia struck Kyiv with a barrage of missiles and drones, killing at least 15 people, including children. Instead, European officials say they’ve grown mystified by what exactly Putin promised the Americans behind closed doors, what U.S. officials took away from their discussions with Moscow, and where that leaves the effort to achieve peace.

“It’s not clear what Putin told Witkoff or Trump or if they understood him properly. It’s a puzzle that we’re all trying to solve.”

Part of the confusion seems to trace to Witkoff’s August 6 meeting with Putin, where certain details regarding Russia’s willingness—or lack thereof—to withdraw its troops from parts of Ukraine appear to have been lost in translation. According to two U.S. and three European officials who were briefed on the conversation, Putin told Witkoff that Russia would require “de jure” recognition—official recognition under international law—of Russian control over two territories that are currently within the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine: the Crimean peninsula, which Russia has occupied since 2014, and Donbas, the region in eastern Ukraine that has been contested for more than a decade but is now largely occupied by Russia.

Putin told Witkoff that, in return, Russia would be willing to give up its legal claim to two territories in southern Ukraine, Zaporizhizha and Kherson, that Russia has partially occupied since its February 2022 invasion. Witkoff, according to the U.S. and European officials, entertained this proposal. But the question of what would become of the thousands of Russian soldiers stationed in those regions was never addressed, the officials told us. Their continued presence would be a nonstarter for Ukraine, but Putin conveniently left the matter out, and Witkoff never asked.

They [European officials] made calls to their American counterparts and warned that if Russia wasn’t required to withdraw from Ukrainian territory, it would almost certainly launch more attacks when the opportunity arises.

The apparent lack of detail in the discussion between Putin and Witkoff has led many officials, who had been hopeful for a breakthrough, to face the reality that Putin’s demands have changed little since the start of the war. One top European official told us that the vague conversation between Witkoff and Putin over territorial claims, as well as questions regarding Washington’s future commitment to long-term security guarantees for Ukraine, are threatening to unravel any progress that might have been made through Trump’s outreach to the Russian leader. All the while, U.S. officials say, Trump is growing impatient.

European officials were hoping that Trump’s summit with Putin would deliver clarity, but they ended up no less confused. A day before Trump was set to travel to Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, as questions over Witkoff’s Moscow meeting emerged, the Europeans sought to ensure that their goals were aligned with Washington’s and offered tips to Trump officials to avoid getting off track. The idea of a potential one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin made many of the Europeans nervous because, as one put it to us, Trump is “not a details guy.”

That Thursday, the president and Vice President J. D. Vance joined a call convened by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that included Zelensky and a handful of other European leaders. After carefully discussing potential sticking points in the negotiations, they emerged with an understanding on seven basic points, according to notes from the meeting that we reviewed. One of the points was that Trump was going to Alaska to secure a cease-fire, but that there would be no talk of carving up Ukrainian territory. Trump acknowledged that he was not optimistic about coming out of Alaska with any concrete results, he told officials on the call, adding that if Putin didn’t agree to a cease-fire, he would hit Russia with sanctions. Peace negotiations, they collectively agreed, could come only after a cease-fire, according to notes from the meeting.

Trump, however, emerged from the meeting discussing territorial concessions, which he said were ultimately up to Ukraine to decide, and fast-tracking peace talks without a cease-fire—precisely what he’d told the Europeans he would avoid. It was then that Zelensky and a number of European leaders put their August holidays on hold and raced to Washington to help shape the American president’s perception of what was realistic.

The Alaska summit was seen as a big win for Putin, who has largely been shunned by the West since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The red carpet, the B-2-stealth-bomber flyover, Trump applauding Putin’s arrival—these were exactly the images the Russian leader needed to convey the message back home that the war was justified and Russia was the victim, not the aggressor. Trump’s discussion of territory and peace talks only reinforced this. But the Trump administration adamantly defends its decision to meet with Putin, noting that the status quo was not working, and that the only way to achieve a breakthrough was through direct talks. It’s something that many European leaders have conceded as the war continues to drain their military stockpiles and strain public support.

Putin, a former Russian intelligence officer skilled in the art of mixed messages, views conquest of Ukraine as essential to his goal of restoring Russia to its Soviet-era glory. And European officials said they fear that Witkoff’s limited knowledge of the conflict’s deep history is a major vulnerability. Witkoff, a real-estate executive and longtime friend of Trump’s, is seen as a shrewd businessman and one of the few people in Trump’s inner circle who truly speaks for the president. He assumed the role of envoy, however, with no prior government or diplomatic experience.

Trump vowed on the campaign trail to resolve the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. As the months pass, his administration is learning that Russia’s deep-rooted territorial claims, which in Putin’s mind date back centuries, can’t be settled overnight. But Trump sees a peace deal as central to his legacy as president—and his possible ticket to a Nobel Peace Prize. Efforts are still under way to find venues for a Putin-Zelensky summit, though many believe that the chances of the two leaders meeting without Trump are remote.

While talking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, Trump said, “I’m not happy about anything about that war. Nothing.” He suggested that he would decide on a course of action in two weeks—a favorite crutch when he wants to postpone a decision—and has said that there would be “very severe consequences” if Zelensky and Putin did not soon meet. But on Monday he conceded that he did not know if they would, and suggested that he might be ready to walk away from the conflict if it drags on.

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The Felon's Frightening Retribution Campaign

During the 2024 campaign the Felon made no attempt to hide his desire to seek revenge and retribution against anyone who correctly criticized him both morally and in terms of failed policies, policies that often betrayed the best interests of America and the majority of the  American people.  With the raid on former national security advisor John Bolton's home last Friday, the revenge campaign is picking up steam.  A piece in the New Yorker noted: "It’s not like he was hiding the plan. When Donald Trump campaigned for a return to the White House in 2024, he openly embraced a platform of revenge and retribution against his political enemies. Even when allies practically begged him to swear off the idea of using the Presidency as a tool of personal vengeance, Trump was explicit about his intentions." Combine this with the Felon's efforts to malign blue states and blue cities - many not coincidentally with black mayors - that did not vote for him under the guise of "fighting crime" and it becomes clear that intimidation and revenge are what motivates the malignant narcissist residing at the White. Frighteningly, much of MAGA world is cheering this on and too many Americans are keeping their heads in the sand as to the danger and menace we now face.  A piece in The Atlantic by a conservative former Republican takes stock of what we are witnessing:

After Donald Trump left the presidency in 2021, he was indicted for retaining dozens of government documents, including some containing nuclear secrets. He was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. His company was convicted of criminal tax fraud.

When Trump returned to the presidency this year, he sought payback by accusing others of the crimes for which he’d been indicted or convicted. The political ally Trump appointed to head federal housing programs—Bill Pulte, heir to a large home-building fortune—has called for a mortgage-fraud investigation of Letitia James, the New York attorney general who won the 34 convictions against Trump. Pulte has also urged investigations of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and legal actions against Senator Adam Schiff and Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

On Friday, the FBI raided the home and office of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, a prominent Trump critic, reportedly in an investigation of improperly retaining classified documents like those for which Trump was indicted.

Trump has denied advance knowledge of the raid on Bolton’s home and office. Yet his denial included a smug hint that maybe he knew more than he cared to admit: “I don’t want to know about it,” he said, but later added, “I could know about it. I could be the one starting it. I’m actually the chief law-enforcement officer.”

Trump has been demanding the jailing of Bolton for half a decade. The president’s ultra-politicized law-enforcement team—Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—would not need a direct order to understand what Trump wanted them to do.

In this second Trump term, things keep happening that would have seemed outrageous—impossible—just a few months before. Every day, there’s a new movement away from the rule of law, toward arbitrary and corrupt personal rule. Among the fearful questions pressing upon the country: How does America ever turn back?

After the first Trump presidency, the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress made a collective decision about what to do next. Individuals who broke the law on January 6, 2021, would face prosecution for their crimes. Congress would investigate Trump’s role in those crimes and publicize the findings. Congress would also revise the Electoral Count Act to clarify beyond even bad-faith doubt: No, the incumbent vice president cannot overturn a federal election, as Trump pressured Mike Pence to attempt in 2021. Beyond that—and unlike after Watergate or Teapot Dome—Congress passed no major reform legislation. It did not, for example, move to stop future presidents from directing Secret Service funds into their own pockets, or from ignoring conflicts-of-interest laws.

After the discovery that Trump had retained government records, the National Archives quietly negotiated with him for 17 months before at last resorting to legal action in August 2022. The federal government hesitated for nearly two years before commencing legal action against Trump for the January 6 attack. He faced aggressive legal actions from state governments and from wronged private individuals, but the federal executive-branch response to his misdeeds and crimes was slow and reluctant. The federal courts were more reluctant still. The Supreme Court invented—more or less out of thin air—a new doctrine of presidential criminal immunity to protect Trump against legal risk for his January 6 actions.

There was a certain logic to this widespread loathness to act. From the perspective of, say, 2022, Constitution-respecting Americans could congratulate themselves that their system had withstood and overcome the Trump test. Trump’s party lost control of the House of Representatives in 2018. Trump was then himself ejected from office in 2020. When his abuses of his authority came to court, federal judges—including those appointed by Trump’s own party—struck them down. Trump was dissuaded by his own appointees from dissolving NAFTA and quitting NATO. His scheme to overthrow the 2020 election failed.

Those cheerful calculations look sadly wrong from the perspective of 2025. Trump was reelected in 2024, this time as the unquestioned leader of the Republican Party and with the support of aides and officials ready to implement his most outrageous whims.

Here’s an example of the contrast between then and now: In his first term, Trump attempted to retaliate against Bolton. Trump fired Bolton in September 2018. Bolton then wrote a book that, among other things, revealed details about Trump’s extortion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Over three months in early 2019, career officials reviewed Bolton’s book for possible misuse of classified materials. Bolton edited his manuscript as directed and scheduled publication for June 2019. . . .  The Trump administration sued to block the book altogether. It lost, in a decision handed down by Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee and one of the most conservative judges on the federal bench.

Bolton prevailed in 2019 because relevant parts of the U.S. government were still staffed by nonpartisan officials who honored their oath to the Constitution even when that conflicted with the president’s wishes.

But in Trump’s second term, the government is changing fast. In his first half year as president, Trump has systematically purged the federal law-enforcement apparatus of rule-obeying public servants. He is replacing them as quickly as he is able with people chosen for their loyalty, without regard for their other qualifications. At the FBI, Trump forced out his own first-term appointees to replace them with absurdly unqualified loyalists chosen for their record of complying with any Trump wish, no matter how glaringly unlawful.  Over at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Trump is building an enormous paramilitary force staffed by people hired for pro-Trump zeal—and who may ignore written law.

Even if the House changes hands in 2026—even if a president is elected in 2028 who possesses a healthy respect for the rule of law—Trump’s second-term perversion of the government will not be easily undone. Yes, of course the next president must immediately fire Patel from the FBI—but will Trump supporters understand the difference between the firing of Patel for the abuse of his office, and Trump’s firing of his own appointee Christopher Wray for resisting the abuse of that same office?

The American system depends upon public understanding that law is bigger than politics, that right and wrong exist independent of who screws whom. Trump’s life and career are based on discrediting the distinction between right and wrong, and on convincing himself and others that the only reality is who screws whom. As of right now, he’s winning that messaging debate, regardless of what happens to him personally. After Teapot Dome, after Watergate, the supporters of the implicated president accepted that he had done wrong, that the guilty should be punished, and that these misdeeds should never be repeated. Any aftermath of the Trump presidency seems more likely to resemble the aftermath of the Civil War: The reactionary losers who tried to overthrow the U.S. Constitution may acknowledge themselves beaten, but they won’t acknowledge themselves wrong.

If they won’t acknowledge that, what confidence can anyone feel that they won’t try again if they get the chance?

 

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The Felon and Project 2025 Push to Whitewash History

Project 2025 is an avoid white "Christian" nationalist which seeks to take America back to 1950 and retore total white far right "Christian" dominance in every aspect of life in America. Not surprising, racial minorities are a particular target and some in MAGA world have even stated they would love to impose a new Jim Crow 2.0 coupled with the subordination of women to male control. Hence the push to erase diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in everything from governmental agencies to colleges and universities and private businesses.  Beyond all this, these forces want to rewrite American history to whitewash it and remove the many unflattering - if not down right horrible - aspects of the nation's history.  For his part, the Felon has a long documented history of racism that ranges from discrimination against blacks in renting Trump owned apartments in Norfolk, Virginia, to calling for the execution of young black males in New York City who were ultimately acquitted of any crime.  This effort to rewrite and sanitize America's history is particularly obsessed with wiping away the truth about the horrors of slavery (for full disclosure, my Charleston, South Carolina ancestors were slave owners, one of whom owned 27 slaves, something I cannot change and certainly am not particularly proud of).  The reality is that by not exposing the nation's unsavory history, we deprive the coming generations from knowing the truth and, worse yet, set the stage for renewed horrors such as what we are seeing with the treatment of brown skinned people being seized and abused by ICE.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at both the whitewashing effort and the ugliness of the past that we all need to remember:

In what looks to be an intensifying quest to reshape American history and scholarship according to his own preferences, President Donald Trump [the Felon] this week targeted the Smithsonian Institution, the national repository of American history and memory. Trump seemed outraged, in particular, by the Smithsonian’s portrayal of the Black experience in America. He took to Truth Social to complain that the country’s museums “are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian,” he wrote, “is OUT OF CONTROL.” Then Trump wrote something astonishing, even for him. He asserted that the narrative presented by the Smithsonian is overly focused on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”

After reading his post, I thought of the historian Lonnie Bunch, the current secretary of the Smithsonian—the first Black person to lead the institution since its founding in 1846—and the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In his 2016 speech at the grand opening of the museum, Bunch thanked Barack Obama and George W. Bush for their support. “We are at this moment because of the backing of the United States Congress and the White House,” he said, turning to them both onstage. It’s sobering to consider how different things are today.

Bunch has been fighting efforts by the Trump administration to bring the Smithsonian into conformity with the MAGA vision of American history, and people familiar with his views say he is committed to protecting the intellectual integrity and independence of the Smithsonian. But how much longer, given Trump’s ever more antagonistic position, will Bunch be able to withstand the presidential pressure?  . . . . A recent letter to the Smithsonian from the White House states that the review will be completed and a final report issued by early 2026, in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary, “to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism.”

Trump’s Truth Social comment on slavery was unsettling for me not only because I am the descendant of enslaved people, and not only because I was born and raised in New Orleans, which was once the center of the domestic slave trade, but also because I am an American who believes that the only way to understand this country—the only way to love this country—is to tell the truth about it. Part of that truth is that chattel slavery, which lasted in the British American colonies and then the American nation for nearly 250 years, was indeed quite bad.

In 1789, Olaudah Equiano published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. His book was one of the first autobiographies ever published by a formerly enslaved person . . . Equiano had been kidnapped from what is now Nigeria and marched for several months to the coast of West Africa. One of the most devastating scenes in his book describes the sadism of the Middle Passage . . . . The conditions were so bad, he writes, that some of the captives flung themselves overboard . . . . Once they arrived on American shores, men, women, and children were forced onto auction blocks where families were broken apart. Once separated, most would never see one another again.

When the captives arrived at the home or plantation of their enslaver, many of them were forced to work in sweltering fields with hardly any respite. . . . . Enslaved Black women were particularly vulnerable to insidious and unrelenting sexual violence at the hands of their enslavers. . . . . The consequences of being caught in an attempted escape were so severe that most enslaved people never dared try.

None of us can imagine what it is like to be subjected to the unremitting physical, psychological, and social violence of chattel slavery. But museums such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture bring us closer to being able to do so by sharing first-person accounts of those who lived through that terrible violence. At these museums, we see the garments enslaved people wore, the tools they used, the structures in which they lived. We see their faces; we hear their voices.

The NMAAHC, in particular, is unflinching in its characterization of slavery as an unequivocally evil system, one whose impact continues to be felt across our society. In 1860, the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory, and railroad combined. Today, although they make up 14 percent of the population, Black people own less than 4 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Still, the museum also makes clear that the Black American experience is not singularly defined by slavery, but also by the art, literature, and cultural traditions that have emerged from, and in spite of, centuries of interpersonal and structural violence. These are not mutually exclusive, and the NMAAHC understands that Americans should learn about both.

And yet the MAGA movement wants to tell a story about America that is disproportionately focused on what its proponents perceive to be the exceptionalism of this country. They are invested in this story because having to look too closely at the disturbing parts of American history would mean having to look closely at the disturbing parts of themselves. But instead of ignoring the shameful parts of our past, shouldn’t we—as individuals and as a country—want to learn from aspects of our history that we are not proud of? What other way is there to become the version of ourselves that we aspire to be?

The Trump administration is, in both public discourse and public policy, arguably the most racist presidential administration in modern American history. Each week seems to bring a new example of its bigotry. I am sometimes tempted, upon encountering yet another instance of this omnipresent racial antagonism, to let it be. How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again? And yet, we must write it down, if for nothing else, then for the sake of those who will come after us.

We must make a record of those forces that seek to erase us and erase our histories so that future generations know we did not simply accept it. Our ancestors’ words remind us that we never have.

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