Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the hour: Trump believes the teaching of history really matters. Historian Beverly Gage will explain. But first: Harold Meyerson on politics this week. that’s coming up – in a minute.
[BREAK]
First up, today’s political update. For that. we turn to Harold Meyerson, of course he’s editor at large of The American Prospect. Harold welcome back.
Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.
JW: Trump’s much-touted cease fire with Iran collapsed on Monday – I think we should probably start there. He ordered the reinstatement of a naval blockade. That is an act of war. Meanwhile, he offered no new strategy for how to get out of this. Oil prices surged and stocks fell on the news. And of course, Republicans are worried how this will affect their declining chances in this fall’s midterm elections. Both the House and Senate have passed resolutions under the War Powers Act that direct Trump to either end the war or seek approval from lawmakers to continue it. Of course, he’s ignored these resolutions. He did give an explanation of why he went back to war with Iran. “These people are crazy. They are extremely unreliable people.” Now, I’m a little confused, because a couple of weeks ago, he said the Iranian leadership was “very rational, nice to deal with,” and he described them as “smart people.”
The latest polls show 37% of Americans approve of Trump’s Iran policy. The share expecting a prolonged conflict rose, now it’s 79% expect a prolonged conflict, and 60% expect gasoline prices to worsen over the next year. I wonder if you agree with the majority of Americans on a prolonged conflict with higher gas prices.
HM: In a word, yes. All of this simply reflects the governing by whim which is one of Trump’s two modes of thinking. The other is governing by bigoted whim, which affects foreign policy, but domestic policy even more. And yes, we are stuck in a war that made no sense to begin with, that Trump has never plausibly justified, and it’s sticking to him like flypaper.
JW: And meanwhile, in court, a federal judge just voided the so-called settlement between the IRS and Trump that would have granted him and his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, protection from tax audits, and that that was the so-called settlement that created that slush fund to pay off, among others, the January 6th rioters. The judge wrote, “this lawsuit was not brought to vindicate rights. It was brought to manipulate the judicial process because the parties were not adverse.” In other words, Trump was suing himself. The abuse was so severe, she said, that she ordered the bar to consider sanctions against Trump’s attorney, and she ordered Trump and the Department of Justice never again to refer to this deal as a “settlement.” She found that the abuse was committed equally by Trump’s private lawyers and Todd Blanche’s Department of Justice. She said the Department of Justice conduct was untenable, that it engaged in tactics prohibited by law. And this comes on the day before or two days before Todd Blanche is appearing before the Senate to answer questions about Trump’s nomination of him to be the attorney general. I wonder whether you think this actually will affect Todd Blanche’s chances to become attorney general.
HM: Actually, I do, because Todd Blanche is the personification of everything that is visibly corrupt, apart from any culture war issues or anything like that. So that several Republicans have real doubts about, if nothing else, the political wisdom of voting to confirm him and the judge’s ruling simply hands the opponents of Blanche’s nomination the political equivalent of several sticks of dynamite, to just blow it up, and will make it harder, certainly, for Republicans to justify a vote for Blanche now.
You know, Trump has a history of putting in temporary appointments and simply letting them sit there, if he can’t get them confirmed. So, we’ll see what happens with Todd Blanche.
JW: Well, now it’s time for your Minnesota moment. That’s news from my hometown of Saint Paul that you won’t get from Sean Hannity. You will recall that ICE agents in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti — Renee Good on January 7th; Alex Pretti, January 24th. And ever since then, Minnesota officials have been trying to get records about those killings from ICE. Minnesota ended up suing the federal government in March for refusing to share evidence in the shootings. Minnesota wanted to determine whether ICE agents should be charged with murder or lesser crimes in those killings. Well, Monday of this week, federal prosecutors finally turned over the key evidence Minnesota investigators have been seeking for months. The county attorney, Hennepin County, which is Minneapolis, announced the evidence includes hard drives containing statements and body cam footage. They also turned over the wrecked 2014 Honda Pilot that Renee Good was driving when ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot her. The DA said, “the wonderful thing now is we have all the evidence. Any time the government is responsible in whatever way for taking the life of a community member. We need to have a full and thorough investigation.” Of course, it is very difficult for a municipality or a state to convict a federal agent of murder or of any other crime. I wonder why you think the feds reversed course and released the info that could lead to murder charges against ICE agents from Minneapolis last January?
HM: Well, look, this is part of the Trump administration realizing that there is really very little public support for ICE disrupting families, established community members, bystanders, etc.. And it comes at the same time that just today, after the killings, the ICE killings of individuals in Maine and in Texas. A new policy from ICE not to interdict moving vehicles, which also of course is the case of Renee Good. So, there is sort of a tactical recalibration on the part of the administration, probably overruling Stephen Miller, if nobody else to put a slightly kinder, gentler spin on ICE’s more-or-less barbarian kidnappings.
JW: And let’s just say the names of the victims of ICE killings. This week in Houston, ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who had entered the United States more than 30 years ago, settled in Houston with his wife. They raised three children. He worked as a builder. And in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE agent killed 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero, from Colombia, who was authorized to work in the United States, was issued a social security number, and was not the target of an Immigration Enforcement operation.
I’m sure you’re right that the outrage in Texas and in Maine over these new ICE killings contributed to their decision to finally release the Minnesota information from last January’s killings. And, of course, this comes on the eve of the Todd Blanche hearings. So, it brings us back to Republican politics in the Senate.
HM: Yeah. And Republican politics generally are, I think the word today would be nervous. The administration has involved itself in a host of initiatives, the Iran war being may be the most prominent at the moment, that have either very little public support, and even initiatives that do have public support, like curtailing the volume of immigration into the United States, it has so run amok with and exceeded, and simply followed the kind of bigoted brutality that is a byproduct of this, but a very unnecessary byproduct of curtailing the volume of immigration, that there are very politically vulnerable Republican elected officials who are going before voters in November understand that at least if they don’t understand anything else.
JW: And we learned on Monday that Trump is giving a prime-time TV address to the nation. I think it’s Thursday night for other presidents. They did this only at big nation-defining moments. Apparently, Trump is going to say he has new evidence that he won the 2020 election. Sometimes it seems like he’s more obsessed with winning the 2020 election than he is at winning the 2026 midterms. This came from a report initially from MS NOW. They reported on Monday, Trump plans to reveal newly declassified intelligence report that he says reveal plans by foreign nations to interfere in the 2020 election and prevent him from being reelected. They say he will be joined on his TV show by the head of the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Homeland Security secretary, and the head of the FBI. I guess we’re all going to watch Trump on TV with his panel here on Thursday night.
HM: Well, actually, we’re not all going to watch it. You and I will probably watch it, Jon, but at this point, Trump’s TV addresses in mid-summer kind of have the ratings of reruns of obscure 1956 black and white TV shows. So, I don’t know that we’re all going to watch it. What this sounds like to me is an attempt to fire up MAGA, what’s left of it, to boost any Republicans who are reluctant to show up at the polls in 2026. I would expect, at the rate we’re going, that Samuel Tilden will soon appear on television to contest the results of the 1876 election. I would watch that, by the way.
JW: Apparently, Trump is going to try to connect the, what he says is foreign interference that prevented him from winning in 2020, with the need to pass the SAVE Act, which is the one that imposes restrictions on Democratic, primarily Democratic voting, prohibiting mail-in voting, requiring government-issued ID at voting places. Not sure there is much of a connection between the restrictions Trump wants now and whatever the director of national intelligence is going to say they found about foreign interference in 2020, but Trump is going to try to make that case. And you and I will be there listening.
HM: Right. And, you know, this is really, as far as Trump is concerned, the only electoral strategy he has: to make it more difficult and ideally illegal for a lot of people who are going to show up to vote against him, in fact, to vote. That’s his electoral strategy –” to winnow the electorate rather than to win it over.
JW: Winnow rather than win it over.” Excellent. New topic: housing in America. We need more housing in America. We need a lot more housing. We need housing that is affordable. Home prices have hit an all-time high this month, and that’s one of the reasons Congress passed a housing bill with strong bipartisan majorities. Kind of amazing in this day and age that there could be strong bipartisan majorities for anything, but Trump announced he would not sign it. He said he was not signing it, “in protest over the fact that the Senate is not capable of passing the SAVE Act.” These restrictions on voting as the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump Republicans summed up Trump’s message was four months before the midterms. You’re not getting affordable housing unless you give up your voting rights. But in the end, this week, Trump just didn’t sign the bill. And it automatically, as a result, became law because he didn’t veto the bill. Kind of an interesting strategic decision by him. We assume the Republicans in Congress absolutely insisted they had to have this thing. They needed something to run on. I’ve been trying to find out all week exactly what’s in this bill. And the problem is it’s not one big boost. It’s like two dozen little boosts. What can you tell us about the housing bill?
HM: Not much more than what you just said, Jon. Yeah. It’s a series of relatively micro initiatives that will, in essence, they hope, be perceived as one macro initiative which it is not. A lot of the good stuff in the bill was put there by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who worked on the bill with a Republican senator counterpart. And, you know, that’s what we have. And I am certain that – even the invertebrate Mike Johnson pointed out to the White House that his members needed this bill. But Trump really is only concerned with, as I said, winnowing the electorate so he can escape whatever fate may await him if the Democrats take one or both Houses of Congress. So that’s really his only concern right now. And the housing dilemmas that the American public faces are not his concern.
JW: He had demanded that the Senate abolish the filibuster, which would enable them to—maybe to pass the SAVE Act. You’ve expressed a lot of doubt that there were a majority of Republican senators who would vote for the SAVE Act. But it’s very interesting that the Senate refused his demand that they abolish the filibuster. This shows kind of unexpected resistance to Trump on the part of the Republicans in the Senate.
HM: Right. And given that there’s very little doubt that the whole purpose of this presentation on Thursday night is directed at having MAGA folks pressure Republican senators who don’t want to scrap the filibuster in order to pass the SAVE Act. That’s kind of a three-cushion shot. But it’s the shot that Trump is taking.
JW: It’s time now for today’s news quiz. Harold, are you ready to play?
HM: I am ready. Particularly if I know the answer.
JW: A multiple-choice question: Who said “there’s only one way to make America great again: Tell Donald Trump to go to hell”? Was that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Lindsay Graham?
HM: I think that may have been Lindsay Graham, once upon a time – speaking of invertebrates, that may have been his ultimate cause of death, since he did a 180 on the merits and demerits of Donald Trump.
JW: You are correct! It was Lindsay Graham, in the 2016 primary, when he was challenging Trump for the nomination, who said “there’s only one way to make America great again: Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
Harold Meyerson – winning, and winnowing. Read him @prospect.org. Thank you. Harold!
HM: Happy to multitask, Jon.
[BREAK]
Jon Wiener: It’s time now for “History on the March: Reports on the battles over understanding our nation’s past.” Today, we’ll talk about Trump’s July 4th attack on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History – for telling the story of America “not as the victory of freedom, but rather one of regret, tragedy, and shame” – the words of Trump’s committee report. For comment, we turn to Beverly Gage. She teaches history at Yale, and her book on J. Edgar Hoover, titled G-Man, received the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize in American History, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. We talked about it here – memorable segment. Her new book is This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History. Beverly Gage, welcome back.
Beverly Gage: Thanks. Good to be here.
JW: On July 4th, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Trump not only provided the biggest display of fireworks in the history of the country, he also issued a scathing 162-page report that says the Smithsonian Museum has failed to celebrate the nation’s heritage and instead has become “a victim of ideological capture by the left.” They have turned the museum on the mall, in particular the National Museum of American History, into “a political tool that denigrates the American story.” The report was written by the White House Domestic Policy Council in response to an executive order of Trump’s that called for “restoring truth and sanity to American history.”
You and I are both professionals here. We both taught the US History survey to college students. And of course, we’ve both been to the Smithsonian Museum of American History, although I haven’t been there for at least 20 years. So, we have a lot to talk about. Maybe we should start with the big picture: the teaching of history, they say, should celebrate the American past, not criticize it.
BG: Well, that’s a strange way to approach what is a complicated set of facts that does have some celebratory elements to it, sure. But it would be very odd not to be able to criticize anything about the past. And this is a strange and troubling turn from our federal government.
JW: The museum, they say, has shifted – these are their words – “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.” Now, they’re not completely wrong in that I think most American historians are not Trump supporters. They voted against him. But still–but still what?
BG: Well, there’s something very funny about the way the report is constructed because it complains about a lack of objectivity, and then it complains about ideological capture. And by that, of course, they mean ideological capture by the left. And then it goes on to be this intensely ideological approach to American history. As you say, there are certain core pieces of the critique here that are not entirely wrong. I mean, the American professional historical profession is in fact quite left liberal in most ways. And so that’s a fact. And there are legitimate critiques to make of the ways that we tell our national story, whether we have a national story, how the left might engage something like the 250th. But those are not actually the critiques that are being made in this document. This document goes from saying “we just need objective history” to then, you know, denouncing the Smithsonian for mentioning gender, denouncing the Smithsonian for using refusing to use the words “illegal alien” or “criminal illegal alien.” Right? So, it’s a very, very strange document in that sense.
JW: Their main concern is about what they say is missing. They say visitors today “will find no major exhibit dedicated to America’s founding era George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Fathers, the Continental Congress, the pilgrims, the Puritans, or major moments of the American Revolution. In fact,” they say, “the founders are presented chiefly in terms of their connection to slavery.” What do you say to that?
BG: Well, I’m not sure that that’s actually true of the Museum of American History. Tim Noah from The New Republic went and said, “is this really true?” And he walked in and the first thing he sees is a big giant statue of George Washington. so I doubt the factual basis for this report, though I have not been there in the last couple of years. So, I’m not going to set about describing the museum’s exhibits.
I mean, I do think there are interesting questions for the left about the left’s relationship to the founding at this point, and whether or not slavery is the central part of the story, whether revolutionary ideas about equality are the center of the story. So that’s a very interesting conversation that we could have, and we might have. But of course, that is not the legitimate concern of this report, which is really just a hit job and a highly selective one. In fact, if you read the report, it repeats itself an awful lot because it only has a few distinct pieces of evidence that it really wants to present over and over and over again.
JW: One of my favorite sections of it are the criticisms of what they call “the museum’s efforts to convince America’s children to defy all authority.” It’s hard to read that without chuckling. This is about an exhibition called “Girlhood — It’s complicated.” In the museum, this exhibit isn’t there anymore, it was sent on a national tour of history museums in states to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. It was heavy with wall text: “Girls have consistently resisted and even subverted how institutions, experts and other social authorities have sought to define and shape them and their girlhood. They have creatively fashioned their own identities, and have influenced the ways we see and understand gender in all its nuances. It encourages us to explore how power operates in American society through the concept of Girlhood.” How bad is that?
BG: That all seems pretty innocuous to me. I mean, as a former girl, I can say it is complicated. But yeah, there are many examples like this, I think in that report where they say there’s this terrible thing and now, we’re going to expose it–and then you read it. Another one is, I don’t have it right in front of me, but in their description of the narrative about the Declaration of Independence, which says, the Declaration of Independence, it was an important document, it’s a document that people have been adopting and redefining and reshaping to meet their own historical moments ever since. And that’s a bad thing.
JW: What’s bad about that?
BG: Exactly right. But the truth is not really the standard that we’re seeming to be measuring in this report. And I would say also the report wants a kind of affirmative story about the United States, that there’s one way of thinking about it, this is what it is; It is reasonably fixed in time, and that’s the only story that should be on display.
JW: I’m sure that you have some criticisms of the National Museum of American History, and so do I. Of course, they’re not the same as Trump’s. My main complaint is that it’s such a lightweight effort to engage young people, maybe even people who aren’t so young. They feature stuff like Julia Child’s Kitchen, her actual kitchen. The most famous place ever since I was a little kid is the first ladies’ gowns exhibit. And Dorothy’s red slippers from the Wizard of Oz movie, this sort of stuff. The objects that,I don’t know, people would get a kick out of seeing or pointing out to their children who they brought there. I’m sure most kids today don’t know what Dorothy’s red slippers are. But this is really nothing like what you get in the college survey of American history anymore. And that’s sort of my basic complaint about this place.
BG: I actually have a real soft spot for all of the things that you described, so I don’t have that objection. I think it is pretty important for historians and people who are interested in history to allow themselves to have some fun. I think most of the stuff that you listed is also important to women’s history, right? Women’s acting, women’s role in culture, first ladies, all of that. So, I don’t want to be dismissive of it just for that reason, but I think it can be a big tent kind of museum. They actually have these extraordinary collections. And so, I’m not going to, I’m not going to vote with you on that one, Jon.
JW: Okay. Well, my main interest when I went there, I was writing my book, doing research for my book on Cold War memory. And they had at that time an exhibit of a family fallout shelter, a real one, the kind of thing that only the Smithsonian would do. An entire steel fallout shelter that had been buried in a front yard in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1955; somehow, they it dug up and moved and put in the museum. Fort Wayne, of course, was, you know, number one on Stalin’s target list for the United States. And these poor people had put a lot of money and effort into burying this thing. And it’s the grimmest, most horrible spot. It’s actually right next to Julia Child’s kitchen, or at least it was 20 years ago, but it’s been put away now. You can just find it on the website. It’s still listed among their collections, but it is the kind of thing that only the Smithsonian would do, and I certainly enjoyed it.
BG: Yeah, I think that that’s actually a great example of finding a way into history that families, people who are just curious, can really relate to and take this imaginative leap into the past. What were the fears that were driving this? What led people to do this in their own backyards? And one of the things that I think is interesting about this report is that it seems to not only be objecting to the usual list of things that the Trump administration doesn’t like, too much talk about slavery, too much talk about gender, too much respect for immigrants. But it is also, though it doesn’t make it explicit, intervening in one of the perpetual historical debates, which is about, do we only focus on the big men of history? Do we tell a history that’s more grassroots, that’s more about ordinary people? And on some level, you would think that the Trump administration would be taking an anti-elite stance, right? You don’t want to just look at the elites. You want to look at the ordinary person. But it’s actually quite the opposite in this report. It’s really focused on the idea that there’s a kind of short list of major elite political figures who are not getting enough attention. And all of these gestures toward broadening out the story, looking at the lives of ordinary people, how they’ve thought about the founding, their amazing diversity, et cetera, et cetera, is supposed to be off the table.
JW: The report not only criticizes specific exhibits that are there and things that aren’t there, they actually threaten budget cuts. 62% of the Smithsonian’s annual budget, $1 billion for all the Smithsonian museums, comes from funds appropriated by Congress. Trump proposed cutting the Smithsonian budget by 12% this fiscal year. That doesn’t really seem up to what they critique here, but Congress has maintained the same level of funding this year. The July 4th report cites how the president’s executive order instructed JD Vance, who is ex officio, an official of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian. JD Vance is supposed to work with the Office of Management and Budget to “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.” Now, that policy, of course, is opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion. So presumably they would like to cut the funding for all exhibits that refer to immigrants, for example. I wonder, is it even possible to tell the story of American history today without diversity?
BG: Well, the answer is no. It’s really not. And the standard for what they’re talking about is not Did something happen? And is it true? Which ought to be our basic standard for history. But as I said, is a kind of purified top-down story of only the good stuff, as you might think of it.
And what’s happening at the Smithsonian is something that is also happening at many other major cultural institutions. The National Park Service, for the last year or so has had to hang signs that are really to that same effect of what you’re saying. The signs say, “If you see anything that unduly disparages a great American of the past, report this to your federal government.” So they’ve been under huge pressure both financially and in terms of control over what’s on display and what employees and guides can say. The National Endowment for the Humanities, I mean, any number of these institutions, and unfortunately, I think they’ve been quite effective at bringing caution into these institutions, really making people run scared, which of course is the goal.
Now, I’m an optimist about the telling of history, which is that once people know this history and we’ve documented all of this history that is being shoved to the side here, it’s not that easy, actually, to get rid of history or tell people that things that they know to be true aren’t true. But I do think that these federal institutions are in an incredibly hard spot. And to some degree, they do have a different set of both civic and legal obligations than a lot of privately run institutions do.
JW: The defense of the Smithsonian’s history museum is led by Lonnie Bunch. He was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History, and he became the first historian and the first African American to be appointed to lead the entire Smithsonian, all 21 museums, in its 173-year history.
There’s an amazing anecdote he reports in a memoir he published in 2019. When Trump became president in January 2017, Lonnie Bunch gave him a tour of the African American History Museum, and he reports that he showed Trump an exhibit of the history of slavery in the United States. And they passed an exhibit on the Dutch role in the slave trade, and Trump commented, “you know, they love me in the Netherlands.” And that was his only comment. It’s just so pure Trump, but still, it’s kind of amazing.
BG: If we could only have a museum that would tell the entire American story leading up to the election of Donald Trump as the end of history, the coming together of all things, our great leader having arrived. That’s really what the American people want, isn’t it?
JW: It is, as you’ve suggested, it’s a familiar view of the American past–great white men and their heroic achievements. It’s the way American history was taught when Trump himself was in high school: no civil rights movement, no feminist movement, no gay liberation movement, no Mexicans, no Muslims. It’s the America Trump recalls when he says “Make America Great Again.”
You might wonder, why does he care so much about history? We worry that no one is majoring in history anymore, the courses are being shut down and the TA’s are being fired. But you can see why it’s so important to him to take back control of how we understand American history. It’s the America that he wants to make great again. Last time we talked, you said “history is hard to suppress.” And you brought that up again a couple of minutes ago. I wonder if you’d explain that a little bit more.
BG: Well, I think we’ve had decades and decades of expanding ideas about American history, expanding the study of American history. And that exists. So, unless we’re going to engage, which I wouldn’t put it past us, in in mass book burning and jailing of history professors, I think that these stories are out there, the research is there. And if the federal government isn’t going to be in a position to take up those stories, other people will.
I do think that there is real value in continuing to study some of the touchstones, the most important figures of the American past, the figures that have been gone over again and again. So, I am not one for not looking at George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Davy Crockett and Abraham Lincoln. And I believe in that kind of history. I’m a political historian. I think it’s important. But it should not be studied to the exclusion of studying the worlds in which these men existed, the other people who played really important roles in creating American politics and society and institutions. And I think we’ve gotten a little locked in in this country to an either/or division that is both methodological – “Who do you study? How much power do they have? Do you do history from the top down and bottom up?” – and then is also ideological in the sense of this great debate that is underway about how you ought to tell history.
It is true that, if anyone thought that history didn’t matter, the Trump administration thinks that the study of history – how we teach it, how we learn it, how we narrate it – they believe it really, really matters. So, I guess that’s sort of a vote of confidence for the history profession. Maybe.
JW: Beverly Gage – she teaches American history at Yale. Her new book is This Land Is Your Land A Road Trip Through U.S. History. Bev, thanks for talking with us today.
BG: Thanks, Jon.