President Trump’s attack on The Smithsonian Institute for focusing too much on “how bad slavery was” is like criticizing the Bible for focusing too much on sin.
Slavery is nothing less than America’s original sin, which all Americans have collectively inherited and whose lessons we’re responsible for learning. It was slavery that triggered America’s internecine civil war whose scars remain today to remind us of our nation’s deeply racist wounds.
Yet even as Trump wants to distract us from “how bad slavery was,” he’d evidently prefer we focus on how great the Confederacy was, at least that’s what’s suggested by his executive order to restore a statue commemorating the Confederacy and honoring those who fought to preserve slavery. Ironically, it’s Trump’s “focus” on his authoritarian ambitions and racist convictions that distracts him from the point of both recorded history and America’s Constitutional purpose.
Indeed, during the course of his political life, Trump has tried to undermine America’s Constitutional purpose: “to create a more perfect union.” Thus, in 2011 he lied that President Barack “Hussein” Obama was not an American citizen; in 2024 he lied that Kamala Harris was ineligible to run for president; and in 2025, he issued an executive order denying birthright citizenship for the babies of non-citizen parents, in defiance of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
At every turn, Trump has tried to sabotage minority representation and inclusion.
Indeed, Trump’s anti-immigrant executive orders, policies, and rhetoric have also been aimed at people of color, like his first presidential campaign in 2015 when he coupled his slogan to “Make America Great Again” with his pledge to “build a great, great wall on our southern border.” He claimed migrants from Mexico, were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” He added Haitians to his 2024 racist campaign when he falsely accused them of eating the pets of Ohioans. And let’s not forget his first term ban on Muslim immigration, his complaint of migrants from “African shithole countries,” and his preference for immigrants from “nice,” predominantly white countries, “like Denmark [or] Switzerland.”
Further, Trump falsely claimed he won the popular vote in 2016, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally. And he claimed during his 2024 Presidential campaign that President Biden’s border policy was a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America” by allowing immigrants to cross the border illegally and to register to vote.
Presently, the President’s attack on minorities includes ICE agents acting like racist brown shirts, arresting and deporting undocumented migrants without due process. His overall strategy amounts to a campaign of vilification, disenfranchisement, and marginalization of people of color. Simply, he believes a racially pluralist democracy spells the end of white majority rule and Republican election victories.
In fact, in 2020 Trump clearly admitted that if more Americans vote, Republicans will lose elections. When Democrats wanted election reforms, like mail-in-voting, same day registration, and early voting to safely accommodate voters during the Covid pandemic, Trump objected: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Though the American democratic experiment depended upon welcoming and absorbing cultures from around the world to peacefully co-exist in a unified nation, Trump intends to preserve a white electoral majority by disenfranchising minority voters and dividing the electorate. It explains his lie that “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting,” and his ingenuous argument that “You will never have an honest election if you have mail-in…. it’s time that the Republicans get tough and stop it, because the Democrats want it. It’s the only way they can get elected.” Meanwhile, he never mentioned that he encouraged mail-in voting prior to his 2024 election, which he won.
But it’s not fraud Trump is worried about—it’s growing minority influence. He doesn’t believe that voting machines and mail in ballots are untrustworthy; he just wants to suppress the votes of those likely to oppose him. He doesn’t believe the vote has been rigged against him; he just uses that false claim to distract his followers from his calculated campaign to rig the next election. He’s not concerned about inequality when he attacks and undermines DEI initiatives—what he fears is racial and democratic equality. So, when Trump claims he will make America Great Again, it means he will make it white again.
Trump’s whitewashing of The Smithsonian exhibit is another part of the president’s racist campaign to repress the voice of minorities and erase their history, amounting to nothing less than an act of American cultural genocide. If the President doesn’t want to hear “how horrible our country is,” maybe he should not compound America’s original sin.
Thomas Cangelosi is a retired teacher from Avon.