Presidential libraries are ideally meant to preserve the documents of our leaders, as a way to understand the past; they conjure an image of shelves lined with notes and correspondences for historians to pick through. This is not Trump’s plan. “I don’t believe in building libraries,” he told reporters. “It’s gonna be, most likely, a hotel.”
Trump’s “library” then has a different defining image: a gold statue of Trump himself, his fist raised in triumph, towering over the stage of an auditorium. This is how he wants to be remembered — not just as a former head of state, but as an idol. “The greatest president our nation has ever known,” declared his son Eric.
Every post-presidency library is part of an act of reputation laundering, intended to cast a former leader in the most flattering possible light. But Trump’s penchant for self-worship and need for revenge take this a step further: It embodies the often stupefying ways the president warps our understanding of history.
Another example came to light a few days later. On Sunday, Politico reported that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum had quietly removed materials from its website and changed its programming, seemingly to appease the president. The museum canceled a one-day education workshop for college students, scheduled for last summer, called “Fragility of Democracy and the Rise of the Nazis.” At first, the event was simply renamed to “Before the Holocaust: German Society and the Nazi Rise to Power” — a less explicit parallel to the modern U.S. Then, abruptly, it was canceled. (A museum rep, emailing with two of the scheduled participants, blamed the decision on “limited federal funds” and “a difficult fundraising environment,” according to Politico.)
After, the museum scrubbed online materials that connected Nazism to Jim Crow. A video of a talk between a Holocaust survivor and a Black woman whose father was lynched was “unlisted” from the museum’s YouTube page. And a page of lesson plans titled “Teaching Nazism and Jim Crow” was deleted from the museum website. (The museum did not respond to Politico’s specific questions about why the page was taken down but directed the outlet to pages drawing more nebulous comparisons between German and American racism.)
These changes seem small. But they reflect a way of thinking about history that muddles our comprehension of the very horrors that museums like the USHMM are supposed to illuminate. At its best, historical inquiry offers clarity, complication, disquiet. To Trump, it is a tool for flattery.