Back in March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeted at the Smithsonian Institution that began as follows: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
Despite the high-minded rhetoric, many worried the order was instead a thinly veiled effort to rewrite history more to Trump’s liking. The order, for example, cited a desire to remove “improper ideology” – an ominous phrase, if there ever was one – from properties like the Smithsonian.
Those concerns were certainly bolstered this week. We learned that some historical information that recently vanished from the Smithsonian just so happens to have been objective history that Trump really dislikes: a reference to his two impeachments.
The Smithsonian said that a board containing the information was removed from the National Museum of American History last month after a review of the museum’s “legacy content.” The board had been placed in front of an existing impeachment exhibit in September 2021.
Just to drive this home: The exhibit itself is about “Limits of Presidential Power.” And suddenly examples of the biggest efforts by Congress to limit Trump’s were gone.
It wasn’t immediately clear that the board was removed pursuant to Trump’s executive order. The Washington Post, which broke the news, reported that a source said the content review came after pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director.
In other words, we don’t know all the details of precisely how this went down – including whether the removal was specifically requested, or whether museum officials decided it might be a good way to placate Trump amid pressure. The Smithsonian says an updated version of the exhibit will ultimately mention all impeachment efforts, including Trump’s.
But it’s all pretty Orwellian. And it’s not the only example.
Trump has always been rather blatant about his efforts to rewrite history with self-serving falsehoods and rather shameless in applying pressure on the people who would serve as impartial referees of the current narrative. But this week has taken things to another level.
On Friday, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This came just hours after that agency delivered Trump some very bad news: the worst non-Covid three-month jobs numbers since 2010.
Some Trump allies have attempted to put a good face on this, arguing that Dr. Erika McEntarfer’s removal was warranted because large revisions in the job numbers betrayed shoddy work. But as he did with the firing of then-FBI Director James B. Comey eight years ago, Trump quickly undermined all that. He told Newsmax that “we fired her because we didn’t believe the numbers today.”
To the extent Trump did lay out an actual evidence-based case for firing McEntarfer, that evidence was conspiratorial and wrong, as CNN’s Daniel Dale documented Friday.
And even some Republican senators acknowledged this might be precisely as draconian and self-serving as it looked. Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, for one, called it “kind of impetuous” to fire the BLS head before finding out whether the new numbers were actually wrong.
“It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for,” said Lummis, who is not often a Trump critic.
Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina added that if Trump “just did it because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”
Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both worried that Trump’s move would make it so people can’t trust the data the administration is putting out.
And that’s the real problem here. It’s not so much that Trump appears to be firing someone as retaliation; it’s the message it sends to everyone else in a similar position. The message is that you might want that data and those conclusions to be to Trump’s liking, or else.
It’s a recipe for getting plenty of unreliable data and conclusions. And even to the extent that information is solid, it will seed suspicions about the books having been cooked – both among regular Americans and, crucially, among those making key decisions that impact the economy. What happens if the next jobs report is great? Will the markets believe it?
We’ve certainly seen plenty of rather blunt Trump efforts to control such narratives and rewrite history before. A sampling:
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He engaged in a yearslong effort to make Jan. 6 defendants who attacked the Capitol in his name out to be sympathetic patriots, even calling them “hostages,” before pardoning them.
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His administration’s efforts to weed out diversity, equity and inclusion from the government often ensnared things that merely celebrated Black people and women.
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He and his administration have at times taken rather dim views of the free speech rights of those who disagree with them, including talking about mere protests – i.e. not necessarily violence – as being “illegal.” A loyalist US attorney at one point threatened to pursue people who criticized then-Trump ally Elon Musk even for non-criminal behavior.
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Trump has repeatedly suggested criticism of judges he likes should be illegal, despite regularly attacking judges he doesn’t like.
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His term began with the portraits of military leaders who clashed with him being removed from the Pentagon. It also began with a massive purge of independent inspectors general charged with holding the administration to account.
All of it reinforces the idea that Trump is trying to consolidate power by pursuing rather heavy-handed and blatant tactics.
But if there’s a week that really drove home how blunt these efforts can be, it might be this one.
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