After a reference to Trump’s impeachments is removed from a history museum, complex questions echo

New York – This would seem the simplest notions: one thing takes place, and it goes into history books or is added to the exhibitions of the museum. But that something even remembers remembering and how – in particular with regard to the history of a country and its leader – is often the most distant thing from simple.

The latest example of this came on Friday, when the Smithsonian Institution said that it had deleted a reference to the 2019 and 2021 dismissal of President Donald Trump of a panel in an exhibition on the American presidency. Trump has put pressure on institutions and agencies under federal surveillance, often thanks to the pressure of funding, to focus on the country’s achievements and progress and far from the things he describes as “division”.

A Smithsonian spokesman said that the deletion of the reference, which had been installed as part of a temporary addition in 2021, intervened after an examination of “recently inherited content” and that the exhibition “will ultimately include all the attackers”. There was no calendar given for when; Exhibition renovations can be efforts consuming time and money.

In a statement that did not directly deal with dismissal references, the White House spokesman Davis Ingle said: “We fully support the displays to highlight American grandeur.”

But is the story intended to highlight or document – to point out what happened, or to serve a desired story? The answer, as for most things about the past, can be intensely complex.

Smithsonian’s decision is taking place in the wake of the Trump administration’s actions as the abolition of the name of an activist for homosexuals from a navy ship, pushing for republican supporters at the Congress to finance the public broadcasting company and get rid of the management of Kennedy Center.

“Based on what we have seen, that is part of a broader effort by the president to influence and shape the way history is represented in museums, national parks and schools,” said Julian E. Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “Not only does he push a specific story of the United States, but, in this case, tries to influence the way in which Americans learn his own role in history.”

It is not a new struggle, in the world in general and in the political world in particular. There is power to be able to shape the way things remember, if we remember at all – who was there, who participated, who was responsible, what happened to this point in history. And human beings who direct things have often extended their authority to the stories told about them.

In China, for example, the references to the repression of June 1989 against the pro-democracy demonstrators on the Tiananmen square in Beijing are prohibited and meticulously regulated by the government of the Communist Party in power. In Russia in the Soviet era, officials who took the turn of leaders like Josef Stalin have disappeared not only from the government itself, but photographs and history books where they once appeared.

Jason Stanley, an authoritarian expertise, said that control of what and how people learn their past have long been used as a vital tool to maintain power. Stanley clearly explained his opinion on the Trump administration; He recently left Yale University to join the University of Toronto, citing concerns about the American political situation.

“If they do not control the historical account,” he said, “then they cannot create the kind of false story that supports their policy.”

In the United States, the presidents and their families have always used their power to shape history and calibrate their own images. Jackie Kennedy insisted on the cups of William Manchester’s book on the assassination of her husband in 1963, “the death of a president”. Ronald Reagan and his wife obtained a cable television channel to publish a carefully calibrated documentary about him. Those who have around Franklin D. Roosevelt, including journalists from the time, took badly to hide the impact that paralysis had on his body and mobility.

Trump, however, brought it to a more intense level – an exercise president encouraging an atmosphere where institutions may feel obliged to choose between him and the truth – whether he calls him 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 emeritus of sociology at the New School for Social Research. “So, a part of these exhibitions and these monuments also consist of locating us in time. And without it, it is very difficult for us to situate ourselves in history because it seems that we simply burst out of the earth.”

Timothy Naftali, director of the library and presidential museum of Richard M. Nixon from 2007 to 2011, chaired his overhaul to offer a more objective presentation of Watergate – not liable to the president’s loyalists. On Friday, in an interview, he said that he was “worried and disappointed” of the Smithsonian decision. Naftali, now a principal researcher at Columbia University, said that museum directors “should have red lines” and that he was planning to remove Trump’s panel as one of them.

Although it may seem without consequence for someone in the power to worry about the offers of a museum, Wagner -Pacifici says that Trump’s vision on history and its role in it – earlier this year, he said that the Smithsonian had “been subjected to the influence of a division ideology and centered on race” – shows the importance of these questions to people in matters of authority.

“You could say about this person, who whatever this person, his power is so immense and his legitimacy is so stable and so monumental that why would he care about things like this … Why would she take the trouble to waste their energy and their effort on this?” Wagner-Pacifici said. His conclusion: “The legitimacy of those in power must be constantly reconstructed. They can never rest on their laurels. ”

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