Covfefe Chronicles: The Smithsonian Tried To Delete Trump’s Impeachments
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The Smithsonian Institution, the nation’s preeminent historical archive, faced swift backlash this week after removing references to Donald Trump’s two impeachments from a permanent exhibit on the limits of presidential power. The move raised alarm about Trump’s growing influence over cultural institutions, with critics accusing the museum of historical whitewashing and political capitulation.
The exhibit originally featured Trump alongside Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. But recent visitors discovered that Trump’s name had been scrubbed, despite his distinction as the only U.S. president impeached twice. Museum officials claimed the omission resulted from a routine “legacy content review” and insisted that updates to the exhibit were in progress.
That explanation didn’t fly. After days of mounting criticism, the Smithsonian reversed course, announcing that references to Trump’s impeachments would be restored “in the coming weeks.” But the damage was already done.
This incident is not a one-off curatorial oversight, but is part of a broader, coordinated effort by Trump and his allies to manipulate the public record and sanitize history in real time. This isn’t just about a museum panel. It’s about epistemic violence. It’s about white supremacy rewriting the story to protect its own mythology.
The Smithsonian controversy is tied to a wider pattern of erasure under Trump’s influence, from his firing of key record-keeping officials like Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan, to his attempts to defund the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Trump’s impulse to control historical narrative isn’t just about ego, it’s about the power to decide what the nation remembers and what it’s allowed to forget.
If institutions like the Smithsonian yield to political pressure and erase inconvenient truths, then truth itself becomes negotiable.
This isn’t just about preserving historical facts; it’s about defending the public’s right to remember. When national museums start sanitizing the record to appease the powerful, they cease to be stewards of history and become accomplices to authoritarianism. In this war on memory, silence is complicity, and revision is a weapon.
The question now is not just what history will say about Trump, but whether we’ll still be allowed to tell it.
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