MSNBC’s “The Morning Joe” panel blasted President Donald Trump’s order to review Smithsonian museum exhibits as a “dangerous” mission that will set back American history, specifically calling out Trump’s move to alter the National Museum of African American History and Culture to align with his own vision.
“He basically wants anything race-based removed from our history,” Willie Geist said during “Morning Joe’s” Wednesday broadcast.
“When you think about when Jackie Robinson was removed from a Defense Department page, his military services as part of that story and his pioneering life, and then it was put back up. And then later, about a month later, Harriet Tubman was removed from some pages. References to slavery were moved down,” Geist went on. “These are not clerical errors. This is a concerted effort, and the president gave license to all these efforts when he signed that executive order a few months back.”
On March 27, Trump issued the executive order titled “Restoring Truth an Sanity to American History,” which is he and his camp’s mission to “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness” that he says will honor “the richness of American history and innovation.” As part of that, Trump has forced the institution to remove and/or revise historical events and facts, including the mention of his name in Smithsonian’s impeachment display and even the Smithsonian’s web page about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, both of which have since been restored.
At the top of the conversation, Jonathan Lemire called Trump’s acts harmful to Americans and their history.
“Let’s be blunt: this is really bad, and really, really dangerous. A nation needs to know its history,” Lemire explained. “It needs to be honest about its history to learn from it, to honor it, and also to then grow and improve for the present and future. There’s no way that rewriting a history to fit one president’s vision is good for a nation’s health or good for our nation’s democracy.”
He continued: “You can be patriotic, you can love your country. We have a 250th anniversary next year. Certainly, President Trump and his team are already gearing up towards really celebrating that. Some of that is good, but to honor a nation’s history, you have to be honest about it and to rewash it, to sanitize it, to whitewash it, to not be honest about it. That’s not good.”
MSNBC contributor, Anthony Coley, jumped in to compare Trump’s mission to his attempt to censor the severity of the Jan. 6 riots on the U.S. Capitol. He also added that ultimately, in order to improve one’s history, you must learn from past mistakes.
“The American story is both glorious and painful — it has warts. You don’t lift up and highlight the glorious parts and bury the warts,” Coley explained. “You tell the full American story and all of its truth. What this guy is doing is trying to turn the Smithsonian into a propaganda machine. He is trying to rewrite history, just like he did on Jan. 6. If you think really about what he tried to do with pardoning all of these, the criminal defendants, the people who were serving jail even for abusing and killing police officers, he’s trying to rewrite the narrative of both his narrative and the American history. But even more broader American history. This is dangerous. It’s chilling, and I think every American who supports honest truth telling and fact telling should be concerned about this.”
You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment in the video above.
