Trump voters might say this is just a little thing, totally forgettable. But it’s not. In fact it is a single, tiny part of a much bigger enterprise to turn the United States into, say, Viktor Orban’s quasi-dictatorship Hungary. Project 2025 used Hungary as a model.
Last week the Smithsonian Institution took down a part of a display concerning presidential scandals in its National Museum of American History. The parts that remained untouched were Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, Richard Nixon’s Watergate, and Bill Clinton’s impeachment (though neither Johnson nor Clinton was convicted and removed from office). The part that was removed—theoretically temporarily—involved Trump’s two impeachments. Gone. Atomized. This is not whitewashing history, it’s erasing it, like a person airbrushed from a Stalin-era photograph. As David Graham of The Atlantic notes, the current display now has this sentence: “Only three presidents have seriously faced removal.”
Graham mentions this as just one of five “assault[s] on truth” from the administration just last week. He also notes that the Trump administration has been “pressuring the Smithsonian to align its messages with the president’s political priorities” and that J. D. Vance is an ex officio member of the Smithsonian board.
Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was a Jewish, German World War I veteran who kept one of the most important diaries of World War II as he and his non-Jewish wife sought to survive Hitler’s rise and fall (they did, but barely). In I Shall Bear Witness, the first volume of his journal published posthumously in 1995, Klemperer mentions that he is asked why he did not focus on the large events of the war that seemed more important in charting its course. His reply was that he chose to focus instead on the “mosquito bites” that he and others experienced and that collectively add up to a dictatorship and genocide.
The Smithsonian’s action is one of those mosquito bites—by itself just an itch to be forgotten next week. It is barely making the news. And yet it is emblematic of Trump and his lackeys’ grand mission to transform a democracy into an autocracy one act and a hundred lies at a time, accumulating and gaining momentum, and leading us in a direction no patriotic American should want.
Also posted on Facebook, 8/5/25
John Rachal's Blog
Mosquito Bites
August 6, 2025 at 3:47 pm (Political Commentary)
Trump voters might say this is just a little thing, totally forgettable. But it’s not. In fact it is a single, tiny part of a much bigger enterprise to turn the United States into, say, Viktor Orban’s quasi-dictatorship Hungary. Project 2025 used Hungary as a model.
Last week the Smithsonian Institution took down a part of a display concerning presidential scandals in its National Museum of American History. The parts that remained untouched were Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, Richard Nixon’s Watergate, and Bill Clinton’s impeachment (though neither Johnson nor Clinton was convicted and removed from office). The part that was removed—theoretically temporarily—involved Trump’s two impeachments. Gone. Atomized. This is not whitewashing history, it’s erasing it, like a person airbrushed from a Stalin-era photograph. As David Graham of The Atlantic notes, the current display now has this sentence: “Only three presidents have seriously faced removal.”
Graham mentions this as just one of five “assault[s] on truth” from the administration just last week. He also notes that the Trump administration has been “pressuring the Smithsonian to align its messages with the president’s political priorities” and that J. D. Vance is an ex officio member of the Smithsonian board.
Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was a Jewish, German World War I veteran who kept one of the most important diaries of World War II as he and his non-Jewish wife sought to survive Hitler’s rise and fall (they did, but barely). In I Shall Bear Witness, the first volume of his journal published posthumously in 1995, Klemperer mentions that he is asked why he did not focus on the large events of the war that seemed more important in charting its course. His reply was that he chose to focus instead on the “mosquito bites” that he and others experienced and that collectively add up to a dictatorship and genocide.
The Smithsonian’s action is one of those mosquito bites—by itself just an itch to be forgotten next week. It is barely making the news. And yet it is emblematic of Trump and his lackeys’ grand mission to transform a democracy into an autocracy one act and a hundred lies at a time, accumulating and gaining momentum, and leading us in a direction no patriotic American should want.
Also posted on Facebook, 8/5/25
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