Don’t Let Them Whitewash Our History
Donald Trump wants to ignore the sins and struggles of our past. He’s wrong.
In the news since Friday: Donald Trump is openly floating the possibility of running for a third term. Elon Musk is distributing corrupt prizes for voting in Wisconsin Supreme Court elections. And we’ve learned one of the Venezuelans the administration imprisoned in El Salvador is a legal migrant who was detained purely because an ICE officer thought his tattoos of the words “Mom” and “Dad” looked like gang signs.
You can’t take a single weekend off with these clowns. Happy Monday.
A Walk in the Park
by William Kristol
I got to my hotel room here in Boston yesterday, flipped on the TV, and saw that we were in the middle of yet another boring NCAA tournament blowout.
Is this the least exciting NCAA men’s basketball tournament ever? Where are the close games? Where are the Cinderella stories? Where are the unheralded players grabbing an unexpected, shining moment of fame?
Sadly, nowhere. Ugh.
In this slightly dyspeptic mood, I decided to enjoy what looked like a nice spring day here in Boston. It was actually 39 degrees. Ugh again.
But my walk in the Boston Common was actually very much worth it. Because I ended up near the State House, at the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial.
This great monument, which took more than a decade for Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt, was unveiled in 1897. It depicts Colonel Robert Gould Shaw leading members of the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry—one of the first black regiments of the Civil War—as it marched down Beacon Street on May 28, 1863, on its way to fight the rebels in the South.
After the Emancipation Proclamation had allowed for the raising of black regiments, Gov. John Andrew of Massachusetts created the 54th Volunteer Infantry. He chose Shaw, a son of wealthy abolitionists, to serve as its colonel. Notable abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, recruited men for the regiment. Indeed, two of Douglass’s sons volunteered.
Two months after leaving Boston, the 54th Regiment assaulted a well-fortified Confederate position at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Shaw and about half of his soldiers died in the heroic yet doomed assault. One of Douglass’s sons was wounded, as was Capt. Garth Wilkinson James, the younger brother of William and Henry James, who had also volunteered for the regiment.
The mustering of the regiment, and its heroism in battle, were key to ultimately recruiting more than 180,000 black soldiers into the Union army. And the regiment’s heroism was also a signal moment in the fight for racial equality—commemorated in the film Glory.
As Harvard’s president, Charles W. Eliot, said in 1897 at the memorial’s dedication, in words now inscribed on the monument’s pedestal:
The white officers taking life and honor in their hands cast in their lot with men of a despised race unproven in war. . . . The black rank and file volunteered when disaster clouded the Union cause, served without pay for eighteen months till given that of white troops, faced threatened enslavement if captured, were brave in action, cheerful amid hardships and privations. Together they gave to the nation and the world undying proof that Americans of African descent possess the pride, courage and devotion of the patriot soldier.
Moving words for a moving memorial.
And they’re somehow particularly moving at this moment when the Trump administration seeks to whitewash our past, with the March 27 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
Even as the memorial celebrates the patriotism of black soldiers, it also can’t help but remind us of a proposition that Trump denounces in the executive order, that “societies including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”
Does this race-conscious memorial maintained by the National Park Service fall afoul of Trump’s command to “remove improper ideology” from government properties?
After all, looking at the monument, one can’t help but reflect not just on the heroism of the 54th Regiment but on the extraordinary injustice blacks have faced in America. And one can’t help but reflect on the injustice of the Confederate cause, the defense of chattel slavery, to which the Trump administration seems so friendly.
And what of the scrubbing of the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library, pursuant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to remove books related to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion themes?
The New York Times reports that so far the review of the library’s holdings has identified 900 books that may run afoul of the defense secretary’s order, including “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.,” and a biography of Jackie Robinson. Is another one of those 900 banned books the autobiography of Frederick Douglass? What of the books about this memorial, and about the events it memorializes? Are these all part of an “improper ideology” from which we must shield ourselves?
No.
Looking at the memorial, I thought of the attempt to whitewash our history. But I also knew that the monument, and the cause of freedom it honors, will stand long after Trump’s executive order is forgotten.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Even MAGAs Can’t Explain Trump’s Foreign Policy… The rationalizations about ways and means and prioritization don’t add up, argues MATT JOHNSON.
Trump’s Latest Bid to Rewrite Reality… From the Smithsonian to the statues, he wants to whitewash America’s past, observes JILL LAWRENCE.
Trump’s Big New Propaganda Push… Nothing says “restoring truth and sanity to American history” quite like lying about it, writes THOMAS LECAQUE.
When ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Actually Means the Opposite… As part of a ‘painful period’ of cuts, Trump and RFK Jr. plan on dismantling the agency that focuses on substance abuse. JONATHAN COHN’s new Bulwark newsletter, The Breakdown, makes its debut! (If you’re getting our emails, you’re already on the list!)
Quick Hits
EID AL-FITR: Over the weekend, millions of American Muslims, including more than 200,000 Afghan Americans, celebrated Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of the month-long Ramadan fast.
This year, for our Afghan allies in the United States, Eid al-Fitr was not as festive as previous occasions. With rumors of impending mass deportations, a dramatic cut in funding to refugee agencies, and the likelihood of a travel ban, the celebration was tarnished by fear, depression, and dread. And as if that weren’t enough, in the past two days, two Afghan Americans have been stabbed outside Islamic centers.
Nonprofits are working overtime to uphold America’s promise to our Afghan allies before the Trump administration betrays them yet again. These men and women protected the United States for decades; the least we can do is let them worship in peace while they wait for their country to be liberated from the same people who aided and abetted the murder of 3,000 Americans on September 11th.
—Will Selber
WALTZ FALLS DOWN: Of the Signalgate clowns, the worst offender was arguably Pete Hegseth, who shared the most remarkably sensitive classified information to the Houthi PC Small Group chat. But inside the White House, the Wall Street Journal reports, the blame is falling on the head of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who reportedly is a real hardcore Signalhead. “Two U.S. officials also said that Waltz has created multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members, including separate threads on how to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine as well as military operations,” the paper reports.
But that’s not why Waltz is really on thin ice, per WSJ:
For Trump, the officials said, Waltz’s biggest sin wasn’t starting a Signal chat to coordinate strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, or even posting Israel-provided intelligence onto an unclassified network, it was having the Atlantic magazine’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s number in his phone and inadvertently adding him to the conversation. . . .
[Trump] didn’t want the media and Democrats to claim a scalp so early in his second administration, according to people close to Trump, as that would admit wrongdoing. One person said that if news of the Signal chat had first appeared in a conservative media outlet such as Breitbart, Waltz would be gone.
Sure is nice to have a president focused on the big stuff. Yeah, yeah, giant classified security breach, whatever. But why do you have that TRUMP HATER’S NUMBER in your phone??
WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS: Bad news for millennials on the trade war front. The AP reports that craft breweries, already on hard times in recent years, are going to be hit hard by the administration’s new steel and aluminum tariffs:
“It’s going to cost the industry a substantial amount of money,” said Matt Cole, brewmaster at Ohio-based Fat Head’s Brewery. Trump’ trade war “will be crippling for our industry if this carries out into months and years.”
The tariffs, some of which have been suspended until April 2, could impact brewers in ways big and small, said Bart Watson, president and CEO of the Brewers Association, the trade group for craft beer. Aluminum cans are in Trump’s crosshairs. And nearly all the steel kegs used by U.S. brewers are made in Germany, so a tariff on finished steel products raises the cost of kegs. Tariffs on Canadian products like barley and malt would also increase costs. And some brewers depend on raspberries and other fruit from Mexico, Watson said.
In anticipation of this price hike, the Morning Shots crew will be drinking as much craft beer as possible before “liberation day” hits and the prices become prohibitive. Tune in to see how tomorrow’s newsletter reads.
Cheap Shots
You’ve got to love the continued naïveté / lack of lessons learned by the media.
The “third term” stuff wasn’t even on the landing page of the nyt. It made #5 on this morning’s Axios with the noted “reality check” about the legal and procedural reasons it’s “highly improbable.”
Just as highly improbable it was that a moron coming down an escalator would demolish the establishment and (insert the other 4,294 things over the last ten years). It is demoralizing how little we’ve learned and how unequipped we are at this moment.
It’s going to be left up to all of us for keeping history - true inclusive history - alive. Teach the next generation (hell, teach your own generation).
But never forget Signalgate. Don’t let it go. Keep it as top news story everyday.