Our History Is Too Important To Let The Trump Regime Rewrite It

The following is part of an excellent article by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” 
— George Orwell, 1984

It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, DC warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released without fanfare on the 4th of July.

The Council itself was packed with Trump with leftovers from rightwing think tanks and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, and Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute. 

It claims that the American Museum of American History has displays that cover the fights for women’s and civil rights and to end slavery along with the positive role immigrants, women, and queer people have played in our country, which it finds deplorable and un-American. It wrote that Smithsonian leadership and museum curators:

“…have directed the museum’s mission away from historical education and scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated, and toward extreme political activism, rooted in Marxism, to divide, dispirit and discourage Americans. … [And have] denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians and Americans” while focusing on “race in areas where it has little to no historical relevance.”

Wild, over-the-top bullshit complaints that our museums are accurately portraying American history notwithstanding, this is far more sinister and dire than it seems.

Pretty much every dictator in history, both ancient and modern, has rewritten his nation’s history because, as Orwell noted, those who control the past can use it to reprogram the future.

Dictators and wannabe dictators rewrite the past to legitimize their rule, typically portraying themselves as representing the inevitable culmination of history, as the nation’s savior (“I, alone, can fix it!”), and as the rightful heir to a mythical glorious tradition like Trump is doing by trying to reinvent America as an exclusively white Christian nation.

In the process, they typically erase their rivals (Trump has replaced Biden’s picture in the White House with a photo of an autopen), reframe negatively their political opponents (ditto), and use the threat of erasure from history as a weapon against their own allies to keep them bowing and scraping (ditto). . . .

The simple reality is that in democracies it’s historians, journalists, courts, archives, universities, and scholars who write history and can challenge official narratives. Debate is expected, and interpretations can change as new evidence comes to light, like we saw here recently with the 1619 Project.

In dictatorships, on the other hand, the state typically monopolizes education, media, and archives, suppresses competing interpretations of history, and punishes those who publicly contradict the official version.

All of which is why it’s so important that we don’t treat the efforts by Trump and his neofascist lickspittles to rewrite America’s history into a sanitized white male supremacist mold as if it’s just some sort of aberration or sick joke.

This is serious stuff, and serious people within this administration are dedicated to destroying our and — particularly — our children’s understanding of the truly revolutionary and progressive history of this nation. 

They’re trying to induce a national amnesia, stretching back through the history of the Klan, the Civil War, and even the American Revolution.

We must push back against them boldly and loudly, and when they’re gone we’re going to have a huge job cleaning up the fascist mess they’re making.

Trump Did A Stupid Thing Because He Refused To Learn From History

Donald Trump started a war without clear goals and without an exit strategy. It was stupid, because the history of such U.S. actions was clear that it was a losing effort - one that could not be won.

The lesson should have been learned from Vietnam. That was also a war in which the United States was clearly the superior military force. The U.S. had the military advantage in training troop levels, and the machines of war. And that was clear in their winning nearly every battle of the war. But winning battles doesn't necessarily translate into winning a war - and the United States lost that war.

They lost because their military superiority did not actually give them the advantage. Vietnam actually had the long-term advantage. That was because for the U.S. to win they had to completely defeat the Viet Congress, the North Vietnamese army and subjugate the Vietnamese people (an almost impossible task). While Vietnam just had to survive and keep costing the U.S. in men and money. Eventually, the war became too expensive to continue with no end in sight.

The lesson was again taught by history in Afghanistan. The United States (and its allies) clearly had the superior force - and once again won all (or nearly all) of the battles fought in the war. But, like in Vietnam, having the superior force did not give the U.S. the advantage. The Taliban had the long-term advantage because all they had to do was survive and keep costing their opponent in men and money. Eventually, with no end in sight, the U.S had to withdraw and the Taliban won the war.

While Donald Trump is quick to try and rewrite history, he doesn't learn from it. The result is a third "forever" war that the United States cannot win. The Iranians did learn from this history. They knew that to win they just had to survive and keep costing the United States in men and money (and economic pain). This gives them the long-term advantage. And with the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians have an advantage the Vietnamese and Afghans did not have.

The war continues, but I see no way for the United States to win it - no matter how long it goes on. It is likely though, like in the two previous examples, Iran will survive and emerge victorious.

That will happen because Trump did a very stupid thing in starting the war.

America at 250 - Some Interesting Bits From The Navigator Poll

 

From Navigatorresearch.org.

Why Is The Economy So Bad For Most People? Because It is Being Run By Billionaires!

The following is an excellent history of economic politics in the United States by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report: 

When FDR took over America in March of 1933, we’d been a largely laissez faire nation since our founding. There wasn’t much government help for anybody other than the rich and powerful. 

Three preceding Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) had dismantled what little regulation was left from the progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and dropped Wilson’s 91% top income tax rate down to 25%, kicking off the Republican Great Depression.

In 1933 a third of America was unemployed, hunger and homelessness were rampant, and only about 20 percent of us were in the middle class; the country had never gone above a third of us in that class. So, FDR, his wife Eleanor, and Labor Secretary Francis Perkins set out to reinvent America. They legalized unions, restored the 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich, made government the employer of last resort, and instituted the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, built schools and infrastructure nationwide, etc.

The result was dramatic. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, fully a third of us had good union jobs and they set the wage floor for another third of us; as a result, two-thirds of us were in the middle class, and could do it with a single paycheck. A single-family home, a car, an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and retire on a good pension.

But from 1933 forward FDR’s New Deal had been under continuous attack by a handful of extremely wealthy oligarchs who resented capping their paychecks to avoid that top 91% tax rate and hated the regulations that made both consumer products and the workplace safer but cut into their profits.

That backlash movement found its voice with Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo in 1971, and Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court the following year.

 

The Memo called for the creation of rightwing think tanks that could influence public opinion, taking over schools and colleges, buying and running media operations, seizing control of the courts (particularly the Supreme Court), aggressive pushback against the Civil Rights movement, and the promotion of “free market” ideology. It was essential, Powell wrote, to “save” America from an incipient communist takeover.

The Memo electrified what we today call the Epstein/Billionaire Class of morbidly rich men. They endowed and built all of that infrastructure, spending literally billions in today’s dollars, putting a rightwing radio station in every city and town, rightwing TV networks, well-paid pundits, “alternative” colleges like Hillsdale, a billion-dollar effort to pack the courts, challenges to textbooks, and an embrace of hard-right Christianity.

Their main message was that government had grown “too big,” a result of the New Deal that must be reversed, and the GOP they own has run with it ever since. 

Although the federal government of the US was smaller as a percentage of either population or GDP compared to virtually every other developed country in the world, it was a meme that resonated with average people who were horrified that we’d been lied into the bloody Vietnam War, resented paying taxes, and felt they were being left behind as a result of the severe oil-shock inflation of the Nixon/Ford 70s.

Their plan worked. Trust in the American government went from nearly 80 percent in the early 1960s to a mere 17% last year. And, just like a marriage doesn’t work when the partners don’t trust each other, neither does a society or a government.

Reagan cemented this by declaring in his first inaugural speech that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” It was the perfect encapsulation of the billionaire hatred of taxation and regulation, but was sold so well that a majority of Americans bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Reagan and the billionaire-owned Republicans in Congress broke the back of the union movement, slashed taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations, stopped enforcing our anti-monopoly laws, sold off federal lands, increased subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, slashed federal spending on education and college, enabled stock manipulation through stock buy-backs, etc., etc.

Five corrupt Republicans who the Powell movement billionaires had helped install on the Supreme Court helped amplify the damage with their 5-4 Bellotti (written by Powell) and 5-4 Citizens United decisions, freeing both billionaires and corporations to buy elections by claiming that “corporations are persons” and “money is free speech.”

As a result, our elections now typically go to the highest bidder and billionaires are the biggest players in our political system. Just 100 billionaires put $2.6 billion into the 2024 election, about a fifth of all spending, and will probably beat that number this fall; in recent elections, roughly nine times out of ten the better‑funded candidate wins, especially in House races.

Meanwhile, 45 years of Powell Memo-style Reaganomics have gutted the middle class. Only around 43 percent of us can now claim that status, and it takes two full-time paychecks today to live like one could in 1981.

Nobody has halted this slide from a highly functioning government and a vibrant, healthy middle class into the mess we have today, all as the result of nearly a half-century of Reaganomics.

The income tax rates are still stupidly low, incentivizing yachts for billionaires and massive bonuses for corporate executives. Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over” as was “welfare as we know it.” Obama turned our healthcare funding system over to a handful of massive insurance companies who are now turning the screws to extract as much wealth from us as they can.

So, people are — quite reasonably — pissed off. Our legislators are bought-and-sold, sometimes even by foreign-loyal entities like AIPAC, our judges are hand-picked by billionaires, and Trump has gutted our “big” government even further.

By the end of 2025, the federal civilian workforce had shrunk by roughly 300,000+employees compared with Trump’s inauguration, a drop of around 10% in a single year.

Education Department staff fell by 43% in 2025 alone, the U.S. Agency for International Development was effectively dissolved, the agency housing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities lost more than half its staff; AmeriCorps shrank by 44%; the Small Business Administration by 33%; the agency overseeing Voice of America and other international broadcasters by roughly 33%; and the National Science Foundation by about 30%.

During the 2025 shutdown, the Trump administration used that crisis they created to carry out at least 4,200 immediate layoffs across seven agencies in a single day, rather than furloughing workers. Cuts hit Treasury (1,446 workers), Health and Human Services (around 1,100–1,200), Education (466 on that day, after earlier large cuts), Housing and Urban Development (442), Commerce (315), Energy (187) and Homeland Security (176), with additional reductions at EPA and the Patent Office.

Laying off over 7,000 people at Social Security has left seniors with frustrating day-long hold times and a lack of in-person appointments, while the feds under Dr. Oz are experimenting with partially privatizing and starting pre-clearances done by big insurance companies and inflicted on traditional Medicare recipients in six states, Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.

As our government is gutted, our social services are crushed, our unions are enfeebled, wages are flattened, and our politicians and judges are wholly-owned properties of a handful of billionaire families and industries, Americans are justified in looking for alternatives.

Ironically — and perhaps alarmingly — billionaires are now looking for alternatives, too. 

Peter Theil, the guy who funded JD Vance’s political career who, through Palantir, has access to mind-boggling amounts of data on us and our future, just moved his entire family to Argentina. Mark Zuckerberg has a 5,000 square-foot doomsday bunker in Hawaii, and Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison are reported to have similar “bolt-holes” in case the public gets too restive or Trump starts a nuclear war.

The bunkers-for-billionaires business is among the fastest-growing in America, with Survival Condo, Oppidum Bunkers and Vivos advertising architect-designed what Oppidium calls “ultra-luxury fortified underground residences.”

Meanwhile, because of Reagan’s cuts to education and civics, two generations have grown up without a good understanding of how government works in a democracy; only 1 in 20 Americans can name the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and a third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government. No wonder they’re curious about fascism and communism.

So, the next time somebody asks you why America is in such a mess, why people no longer care or even despair about the future, let them know the simple and real answer: “It’s the billionaires, stupid.”