Donald Trump Is No Patriot

On 17 September 2020, President Donald Trump delivered a speech at the “White House Conference on American History,” an event at the National Archives Museum in Washington D.C. In this speech, Trump claimed that United States history teachers all across the country who are radical leftists and who hate America are using their positions to indoctrinate schoolchildren into what he regards as a dangerous and evil anti-American ideology, which he claims is causing “riots and mayhem” all over the country.

Therefore, he has promised to issue an executive order to “restore patriotic education to our schools” by establishing a “1776 Commission” to “encourage” teachers across the country to only teach American history in a way that inspires patriotism and makes students proud to be Americans.

In other words, Trump doesn’t want teachers to talk about any of the bad stuff that the United States has done. He wants real history to be thrown out of schools and a heavily sanitized, jingoistic narrative to be taught instead. The full transcript of Trump’s speech is available on the White House’s official website. Here is my response to some of the things he said.

What Trump knows about American history

Near the very beginning of his speech, Trump makes the following mission statement:

“Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character. We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

It is both hilarious and terrifying to see Donald Trump trying to set the national curriculum on U.S. history, considering the fact that he lacks even the most basic level of knowledge about U.S. history and clearly has no business whatsoever telling history teachers what they should teach.

On 1 February 2017, Trump notoriously said that the Black American abolitionist leader, reformer, and orator Frederick Douglass—who died in 1895—is “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.” His use of the perfect tense rather than the simple past tense to describe Douglass’s achievements made it sound like he thought Frederick Douglass was still alive.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Black American abolitionist, reformer, and orator Frederick Douglass, who—contrary to what Donald Trump once seemed to suggest—has been dead for a very long time

In a speech at the Lincoln Memorial on 4 July 2019, Trump’s teleprompter went out while he was in the middle of delivering a speech that had been prepared for him by his speechwriters, leading him to make the following bizarre pronouncements about the American Revolution:

“In June of 1775, the Continental Congress created a unified army out of the revolutionary forces encamped around Boston and New York … The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware, and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown. Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.”

The American Revolution was fought from 1775 to 1783. As I think most people are well aware, there were no planes or airports at that time.

Furthermore, the bombardment of Fort McHenry actually happened during the Battle of Baltimore in September 1814 during the War of 1812, not during the American Revolution. It’s also really weird for him to say that the United States had “nothing but victory” in that battle, considering that, although the American forces did indeed win, four Americans were killed and twenty-four others were wounded.

ABOVE: Engraving by John Bower of the bombardment of Fort McHenry by the British, which took place in September 1814 during the War of 1812

These are just some of Trump’s more amusing historical gaffes. His claim in his speech that the United States is the “most exceptional nation in the history of the world” is equally ridiculous. The idea of “American exceptionalism” is a myth.

Sure, the United States is unique in the sense that there has never been another country that is exactly like it, but this is true for every country because every country is unique in some way or another. The United States is certainly not “exceptional” in the sense that it is inherently better than all other nations and uniquely exempt from the broader trends in global history.

Acts of cruelty and oppression have been perpetrated in the United States—and by the United States government—with no less frequency than they have been perpetrated by dozens of other countries around the world. The United States government is responsible for enforcing the enslavement of Black people, the theft of Native American land, the Trail of Tears, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, Japanese internment during World War II, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, drone strikes on civilians in the Middle East, and all kinds of other atrocities that are too numerous for me to name.

This doesn’t mean that the United States is a uniquely evil country; there are some countries that have committed even greater atrocities, such as Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, it is silly to pretend that the United States government has always acted on the side of mercy and benevolence. We don’t do anyone any good by lying to ourselves and, in fact, we are doing real harm to the people that our country has mistreated—and continues to mistreat.

ABOVE: Photograph of the mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb that the United States military dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 9 August 1945

“Left-wing indoctrination in our schools”?

Later in the speech, Trump went into a full-on rant about how “left-wing indoctrination in our schools” is supposedly causing “rioting and mayhem.” He said:

“As many of you testified today, the left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long. Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.”

“The left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies. There is no better example than The New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project. This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”

“Nothing could be further from the truth. America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.”

It’s true that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has a lot of serious problems. The main problem is that lacks nuance; instead of debunking the hero cults surrounding various traditionally revered figures in United States history by contextualizing them in light of their various misdeeds—some of which I discuss in great detail in this article from September 2020—Zinn tries to portray them all as uncomplicated villains, while simultaneously portraying activists and laborers as uncomplicated heroes.

In the end, Zinn merely replaces an old hero narrative with a new one. The reality is that there are rarely ever “heroes” and “villains” in history. Human beings are complicated and it is possible for people to do some truly great things while also doing some truly terrible things.

Zinn’s agenda also leads him to rely on some extremely dubious sources. For instance, when talking about the death toll of the Allied bombing of the city of Dresden in February 1945, he cites The Destruction of Dresden, a thoroughly discredited work written by the avowed Holocaust denier and Adolf Hitler admirer David Irving, who knowingly relied on falsified evidence to claim that the bombing of Dresden killed far more people than it really did. (In reality, it is estimated to have killed around 25,000 people, which is still a lot.)

The 1619 Project has some serious problems too. For instance, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay for the project inaccurately claims that one of the primary reasons why the American colonies declared independence from Britain was because the colonists were afraid that Britain would try to abolish slavery.

The historian Leslie M. Harris, a professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University who was a consultant for the project, wrote an op-ed for Politico saying that she specifically told the 1619 Project that this was inaccurate, but they ignored her.

ABOVE: Photograph of the American leftist and historical writer Howard Zinn, known for his book A People’s History of the United States

What Donald Trump is advocating, though, is a distortion of the historical record far more appalling than anything you might possibly hear from Zinn or the 1619 Project; while Zinn and the 1619 Project may not be entirely fair to certain figures from United States history, Trump wants us to forget about their faults entirely and simply worship them as idols, without even understanding who they really were or what they really did.

Regardless of whether the United States was “founded on the principle of oppression,” it is undeniable that the systematic oppression of Black people, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic people, women, gay people, trans people, and other groups has been an integral part of our country’s history since the very beginning. In Trump’s mind, though, teaching about the atrocities and acts of oppression that have been committed by the United States and by traditionally revered American historical figures at all is unacceptable.

I already argued in this article from November 2019 that tearing down Confederate monuments is not in any way “erasing history,” since monuments are for glorifying people, not remembering history. What Trump is advocating now, though, really is erasing history, because he’s arguing that certain parts of history—specifically all parts pertaining to the unsavory actions of the United States government and traditionally revered American historical figures—should not be taught to children in schools. In effect, Trump wants American schoolchildren to be as ignorant about their country’s history as he is.

To the extent that there really are people rioting, they are not rioting because a handful of schools in some parts of the country are teaching classes with anti-racist curricula, but rather because of the complete failure of Trump’s administration as well as many state and local governments to adequately respond to the serious issue of police brutality against Black people. Instead of trying to end police brutality, Trump has been actively encouraging law enforcement to be more brutal.

Violence just leads to more violence. Trump’s repeated injunctions for law enforcement to crack down on protesters have only resulted in more protests and, indeed, more riots. If Trump really wanted people to stop rioting, he would stop ranting about critical race theory and Howard Zinn and actually address the real root cause of the riots, which is police brutality itself.

ABOVE: Photograph of armored police officers using tear gas against protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin

Trump’s “solution”

Trump declared that, to remedy the supposed problem of leftist indoctrination in schools, he will be signing an executive order to create a national commission to “encourage” teachers to only teach students about American history in a way that encourages patriotism:

“Today, I am also pleased to announce that I will soon sign an executive order establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education. It will be called the ‘1776 Commission.’ Thank you. Thank you. It will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding. Think of that — 250 years.”

He ended the speech on an optimistic note, declaring:

“With the help of everyone here today, the legacy of 1776 will never be erased. Our heroes will never be forgotten. Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and all of their soul.”

I’m not the sort of person who makes accusations of fascism lightly, but what Trump says here about “patriotic education” and about “our youth” being “taught to love America with all of their heart and all of their soul” sounds really fascist. This is the kind of rhetoric you would expect to hear from Benito Mussolini, not the president of the United States.

It’s also especially ironic to hear Trump promising that American “heroes will never be forgotten” in the context of his own actions later that day. On 17 September 2020, the very same day that Trump delivered this speech, the brand new Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial was dedicated in Washington D.C. Every time a major new memorial has been dedicated in Washington D.C. for over the past half century, the sitting president has at least attended the ceremony. For some reason, though, Trump decided to not attend the dedication of the Eisenhower Memorial. Instead, he decided leave D.C. to go to a campaign rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin.

Why would Donald Trump, a man who claims to be devoted to protecting monuments honoring “American heroes,” refuse to attend the dedication ceremony of a new monument in Washington D.C. honoring one of our most highly esteemed presidents? Could it possibly be because he is a really a self-serving, opportunistic narcissist who doesn’t care at all about history, patriotism, or the United States itself and who only talks about these things to rile up his supporters?

ABOVE: Photograph from this article from Smithsonian Magazine of a statue group that is a part of the brand new Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington D.C., whose dedication ceremony Trump did not attend

Some other issues that Trump is distracting from

I think that part of the reason why Trump keeps ranting about how leftist schoolteachers are supposedly indoctrinating students into hating America is because he is trying to distract from the fact that our country is currently in shambles. We are experiencing national crisis after national crisis in a rapid-fire succession like we have not seen at any point within living memory.

We are in the midst the deadliest pandemic our country has seen in over a century. As of the time I am writing this on 18 September 2020, the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States is 6,925,534. The number of people in the United States who are confirmed to have died of COVID-19 is 203,139.

Just for comparison, the total number of Americans who died in World War I was only 116,516. That means COVID-19 has already killed over eighty thousand more Americans than World War I. Right now, the only wars that have killed more Americans than COVID-19 are World War II (which killed 405,399 Americans in total) and the American Civil War (which is estimated to have killed somewhere around 655,000 Americans).

Even those who haven’t personally caught the virus have been greatly impacted by it. I was going to study abroad in Greece this summer, but I never got to go because my university cancelled all study abroad programs. I also got kicked out of my university-owned apartment in the middle of March and had to move back in with my parents on short notice.

Many people have lost loved ones to the virus. One teenager in Georgia lost both of his parents to COVID-19 in a single week. I haven’t personally lost anyone to COVID-19 yet, but I was prevented from seeing my maternal grandfather when he was dying of cancer because of restrictions on who was allowed to visit the nursing home he was in. Finally, on 3 August, the nursing home was going to let my sister and I see him in person one last time, but he died that morning before we got in the car.

Unfortunately, the death toll for COVID-19 will only continue to rise. It is highly unlikely that any vaccine will be available to the general public until the end of 2021 at the very earliest. Even once there is a vaccine, it will not be perfect and people will continue to die of the virus until herd immunity is established. By December 2021, I predict that the number of Americans who have died of COVID-19 will probably be much higher than the number of Americans killed in World War II.

ABOVE: Photograph of workers burying victims of COVID-19 from New York City in unmarked mass graves on Hart Island at the western end of Long Island Sound

Meanwhile, global climate change is causing summers on the west coast to become hotter and drier than ever before, resulting in more severe wildfires. Even though the wildfire season is only half over, wildfires on the west coast have devastated roughly 3.3 million acres of land so far, which is far more than any previous year on record.

On 10 September, the state of Oregon ordered 500,000 people—roughly one tenth of the state’s total population—to evacuate their homes. At least thirty-six people have been killed so far and nearly two dozen more are missing. Last week, there were so many fires blazing out of control that the sky over the entire west coast became choked with smoke and ash, causing it to appear an apocalyptic orange.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article from The New York Times of firefighters struggling to put out a wildfire in Madera County, California

ABOVE: Photograph from this article of the apocalyptic orange sky over San Francisco from 9 September 2020

Climate change is also causing a dramatic increase in the number and severity of tropical storms and hurricanes. The Atlantic hurricane season is only half over, but it is already the second most active hurricane season on record. (The most active season was in 2005.) So far, there have been twenty-four tropical cyclones, twenty-three named cyclones, eight hurricanes, and two major hurricanes.

There have been so many tropical storms that weather forecasters have run out of letters of the Latin alphabet to name them after and they have been forced to start using letters of the Greek alphabet. This is only the second time they have ever done this. (The first time was in 2005.) Altogether, these tropical cyclones have resulted in 133 total deaths (not all of them in the United States) and caused at least $22.235 billion in damages.

Obviously, Trump didn’t cause the global pandemic, the wildfires on the west coast, or the hurricanes in the Atlantic, but he is certainly doing an extremely poor job of handling them. Instead of actually addressing the big issues like police brutality, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change, Trump keeps deflecting and trying to convince people that schoolteachers not teaching children to be patriotic enough are somehow the real problem.

We need a new president. Getting Trump out of office will certainly not solve all our country’s problems, but it would at least be a step in the right direction.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of five simultaneous cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean on 14 September 2020