Trump's War on History

For Trump, “the enemies that matter are in the present: us, history professors, journalists, and any others who represent ‘wokeness,’” says Johann Neem, a historian at Western Washington University. In Neem’s view, Trump is weaponizing the backlash against genuine excesses in progressive scholarship as part of a “larger project to shut down independent sources of knowledge and authority.” Even as the administration purports to celebrate the American Revolution, it is waging “a cultural counterrevolution that has authorized them to feel comfortable violating the political principles of that revolution.”