I raised my hand. The nun called on me.
She was telling my grade-school class at Nativity – seven-year-olds in green uniforms – about the pitiless epoch of slavery.
I thought I had an important counterintuitive point to make – even though it would be another decade before I knew what “counterintuitive” meant.
“One thing,” I piped up, “is that we got all these really great people in our country.”
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Although Washington has always been very segregated, my family lived in an integrated neighbourhood and my two best friends were black sisters named Deborah and Peaches. I was about to tell the nun about them when she crooked her finger and beckoned me to the front of the room.
When I got there, she roughly pulled me over her lap, yanked my pinafore up and spanked me hard – delivering many whacks. The other students gawked.
I got the message: there was no silver lining to slavery. There is nothing positive to say. Ever. Under any circumstances.
If only that nun were still around to drill that into the president’s thick skull.
Donald Trump is what the nuns called “a bold, brazen piece”, transgressing in nefarious and damaging ways. He said this week that he’s worried about getting into heaven. He should be. The no-nonsense Franciscan sisters at Nativity would have warned him to worry. He has invented new commandments, beyond the usual 10, to break.
He told Fox & Friends he hoped that if he brokered peace between Russia and Ukraine, he could slip through the Pearly Gates.
“I want to try and get to heaven if possible,” he mused. “I’m hearing that I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.”
Trump unveiled a dramatic new painting of himself hanging in the West Wing, with his favourite scowl, striding away from a conflagration. It’s a perfect metaphor – he sets fires and leaves destruction in his wake.
On Tuesday, the president posted a screed against the Smithsonian. It was jarring to read, given how many happy childhood memories I have of the beloved “nation’s attic”. I saw Dorothy’s ruby-red slippers there and the first ladies’ inaugural dresses and the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk plane and the ominous Enola Gay bomber.
Back in 1982, working at Time, I covered the cleaning and inventory of the Smithsonian’s 78 million items – only 3 per cent were on display – and saw all the wild, wonderful and weird detritus behind the scenes, including Teddy Roosevelt’s Teddy Bear, Mrs Grover Cleveland’s wedding cake box, leftover Tang from the astronauts, stuffed white rats that had been used in a Soviet space shot, a miniature compass embedded in an acorn from an oak tree that George Washington planted at Mount Vernon, 100,000 bats, 24,797 woodpeckers, 10 specimens of dinosaur excrement, a male gorilla preserved in formaldehyde, and the pickled brains of some former Smithsonian officials.
Trump is unmoved. He wants to live in the Whiter House. On Truth Social, he ranted: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” adding, “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE.”
He said that he had “instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.”
If Barack Obama was the first to use the presidency as a springboard to Netflix, Donald Trump is the first to use the presidency to be a gadfly, flitting around and sticking his vindictive nose where it doesn’t belong – like John Bolton’s closets and the nation’s attic. It’s going to take a long time to fix all the horrible overreaches of this president.
Trump is a dark genius at distorting reality into deceptive narratives to reshape history – insisting the 2020 election was stolen and turning the January 6th insurrectionists into pardoned “patriots”. Now he’s trying to say that we shouldn’t dwell so much on slavery. He’s a walking, talking deepfake.
He thinks our tortured history of slavery is getting in the way of America being “the HOTTEST country in the world”. (The Saudis told this to Trump to puff him up, and he’s been repeating it ever since.)
Trump whitewashing slavery is the ultimate act of white privilege from a nepo baby who is the apotheosis of white privilege.
We had about 700,000 Americans die in a war over slavery. As presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told the New York Times’s Zolan Kanno-Youngs: “It’s the epitome of dumbness to criticize the Smithsonian for dealing with the reality of slavery in America.”
Abe Lincoln, whose top hat and rifles are in the Smithsonian, urged Americans to move past the US civil war “with malice toward none, with charity for all”. Trump has malice for all, charity toward none.
He’s tried to restore Confederate statues and names. He’s retreating from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His flunkies have downplayed black icons such as Harriet Tubman, the Tuskegee Airmen and Jackie Robinson.
That kind of behaviour could make a nun kick in a stained-glass window. And it certainly won’t get you into heaven.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
