Politics
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August 6, 2025
The president is making a giant push to rewrite the previous in favor of a few of America’s prime historic traitors, racists, and scumbags.
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A pedestal that after held a statue of Accomplice Gen. Albert Pike sits close to Judiciary Sq. on August 5, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Pictures)
With the expansive program specified by Undertaking 2025 roughly half-complete simply six months into the second Trump administration, the Trumpified GOP is setting its sights on finishing its conquest of the American previous. It’s the logical subsequent transfer for a motion devoted to creating the nation “nice once more,” and it provides many prime alternatives to maintain MAGA followers equipped with contemporary purple meat whereas President Trump is lowered to making an attempt to distract folks from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal by taking bizarre constitutionals on the White Home roof.
On Tuesday, the administration introduced that the Nationwide Park Service will likely be restoring a statue of Accomplice Gen. Albert Pike that was toppled and eliminated in the course of the 2020 George Floyd protests in Washington, DC. The service is presently cleansing the statue, which protesters had defaced, and plans to return it to its former residence close to Judiciary Sq., just a few blocks from the Nationwide Mall, in October.
The transfer, which comes two months after Trump introduced he was restoring Accomplice names to US army bases that had changed them, carries a private that means for the grudge-prone president. On the top of the Floyd protests in Washington, Trump dispatched troops to interrupt up an indication at Lafayette Sq. close to the White Home; he proceeded to make use of the event to stage a supremely awkward, and decidedly counter-Christian, picture of himself brandishing a Bible as federal officers menaced peaceable protesters. Three weeks later, on the night time of Juneteenth, demonstrators introduced down the Pike statue. Trump—who reportedly requested then–Secretary of Protection Mark Esper whether or not officers might open fireplace on the protesters at Lafayette Sq.—referred to as for the DC police to come back down laborious on the Pike statue’s assailants. “These folks ought to be arrested instantly,” he tweeted then. “A shame to our nation.”
Pike was removed from deserving of such righteous ire on his behalf. Certainly, activists and advocacy teams had been making an attempt to get his statue eliminated lengthy earlier than the appearance of the Floyd protests. Along with being a traitor and a racist, he was pressured to resign his army fee after lower than two yearsafter the Native American troopers below his command have been accused of scalping Union troops. Three years earlier than the Civil Conflict started, Pike endorsed a round in his residence state of Arkansas urging that free Black residents be expelled from the state, deploring the “evil” of “the existence amongst us of a category of free coloured individuals.”
Pike was a distinguished Mason, and his statue bears a plaque citing “his 32 years as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Historic Ceremony of Scottish Freemasonry.” (His fascination with the recondite ceremonies of Masonry fueled hypothesis that he was additionally concerned within the group of the equally secretive Ku Klux Klan, although no proof helps a proper Klan affiliation; one scholar does contend that he was the writer of the Klan poem “The Wolf Is on the Desert.”) Pike’s statue was put in on the Judiciary Sq. website in 1901, throughout a nationwide agitprop marketing campaign to position Accomplice monuments in public venues to mark the triumph of apartheid rule within the South after the abandonment of Reconstruction.
The ideological transient behind the Accomplice monument complicated is a central historic element that by no means will get talked about in MAGA’s restorationist campaign. That’s as a result of it utterly undermines appeals to a mythic Misplaced Trigger “heritage” on behalf of the previous Confederacy—in actuality, the mass distribution of Accomplice memorials served the anything-but-antiquarian goal of shoring up the unfold of white supremacist Constitutions within the South. As George Orwell famously noticed of comparable tasks undertaken by the ruling occasion in 1984, “Who controls the previous controls the long run: who controls the current controls the previous.”
Present Situation
That is additionally why the MAGA assault on really present historical past is simply getting began. As he visited Israel throughout Congress’s summer time recess, Home Speaker Mike Johnson introduced his intention to retire the time period “West Financial institution” in reference to the Occupied Territories in favor of the biblical names Judea and Samaria—reaching again millennia into one other ideologically charged model of the area’s previous for the sake of buttressing the legitimacy of one other modern apartheid regime. (Johnson cribbed this concept from laws directing faculties and universities in Arkansas to make use of the identical nomenclature, which was signed into regulation this spring by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was tagging together with him on the identical junket.)
Neither is the revisionist drive of at present’s GOP confined to the remoter stretches of the previous. Trump’s bid to whitewash and memory-hole the failed coup of January 6 has been an act of historic erasure worthy of Josef Stalin—and was topped final week by the Senate affirmation of Emil Bove, a former Division of Justice official who fired a gaggle of prosecutors who introduced costs in opposition to the insurrectionists, as a federal appellate decide. And Trump’s director of nationwide intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has jump-started a parallel bid to exchange the tangled chronicle of Russian efforts to affect the 2016 election with a just-so fable of outraged Trumpian innocence, not lengthy after a Senate net web page chronicling congressional inquiries into the Russia marketing campaign was purged. Trump’s quisling legal professional normalPam Bondi, has adopted go well with with an announcement that she’s impaneling a grand jury to pursue potential prison costs in opposition to… properly, historical past, as far as I can inform.
All this frantic rewriting of historical past in all probability gained’t obtain the prime directive of making mass amnesia on the subject of Trump’s decade-and-a-half-long friendship with Epstein; certainly, Bloomberg Information’ Jason Leopold studies that Trump’s identify has been redacted from among the greater than 100,000 paperwork within the FBI’s file on the pedophile and intercourse trafficker. The previous has a humorous manner of overtaking you whilst you’re furiously making an attempt to recast it in your individual picture.
Chris Lehmann
Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was previously editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the writer, most just lately, of The Cash Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville Home, 2016).
