The reality of slavery: Rebutting Trump’s claims – The Hill

Opinion>Civil Rights

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No, our museums cannot just ‘move on’ from slavery — Christmas shows us why

by Robert E. May, opinion contributor – 09/03/25 2:00 PM ET

  I was not surprised by President Trump’s Truth Social post that the Smithsonian and other American museums are excessively focused on “how bad slavery was.” Trump’s post is consistent with MAGA’s triumphalist insistence on eviscerating critical analyses of America’s problematic race relations and history from the nation’s schools, cultural institutions and mass media.

Without endorsing racial bondage, his call encourages MAGA’s white supremacist elements and discourages efforts to address racial disparities relating to slavery’s long-term constraints on Black progress.

As someone who has long studied, taught and written about the American South and slavery, I am appalled. Trump’s position trivializes the injustices and horrors of enslavement, implying they barely merit mention within America’s historical narrative.

I propose, counterintuitively, to rebut Trump’s messaging by looking microscopically at the moment in the plantation calendar when slaves supposedly were treated best. By illuminating how horrific racial bondage was even when legend says enslavers were at their most humane, we can grasp the ahistorical absurdity of Trump’s position that museums move on.

That time was Christmas. There is a near-consensus that slaves were happiest, if you can say such a thing, over the holiday. Supposedly, starting Christmas Eve, slaves not only were excused from working for up to a week, but masters put whips aside, gave them amazingly generous presents, threw them sumptuous feasts and dances, and allowed them to marry and travel anywhere nearby they wanted.

The trouble is this stereotype derives largely from memoirs of post-Civil War “Lost Cause” southern writers who reimagined slave holidays to justify southern secession and the Confederacy. Such writings overlooked the vast profits accruing to slaveholders from coerced labor and sometimes claimed that slaves had it better than masters and lacked interest in freedom.

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Letters from an American – July 31, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

July 31, 2025, by Heather Cox Richardson

On Monday, at a meeting with U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, President Donald Trump boasted that he was solving all the world’s problems: “I’ve stopped six wars in the last—I’m averaging about a war a month. But the last three were very close together. India and Pakistan, and a lot of them. Congo was just and Rwanda was just done, but you probably know I won’t go into it very much, because I don’t know the final numbers yet. I don’t know. Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints. They’ve been fighting for 500 years, intermittently, and we solved that war. You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it….”

Yesterday, as Jeff Tiedrich noted, he promised he would fix the United States as well. “I think we’re gonna have the richest economy you’ve ever seen. We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion. We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing 750 billion plus 400 billion, plus 300 billion, and many other countries.”

Today the administration announced that Trump is adding a 90,000-square-foot event space to the White House. The White House itself, excluding the East Wing and the West Wing, is about 55,000 square feet. Groundbreaking for the new ballroom, which will replace the East Wing, is supposed to start in September, although it is not clear who picked the architects or the design. The administration says Trump and private donors will fund the building, which is estimated to cost around $200 million.

The announcement says that “[f]or 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed.” Traditionally, the White House has been called “The People’s House” because it symbolizes that the government belongs not to the temporary inhabitant of the building but to the American people.

And yet it seems as if rather than representing the people’s government, Trump is trying to turn that historic building into the kind of property in which he is comfortable, something like Mar-a-Lago, where he can host parties in a big gold room.

It certainly doesn’t seem as if much governance is going on in Trump’s White House. As Josh Marshall pointed out today in Talking Points Memo, when the head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy resigned today, it turned out that the White House had never formally appointed him in the first place. Marshall added: “We’re six months into this administration and it wasn’t even clear whether this guy was ever in the position at all…. And now he’s gone from the position…that he may or may not have held. This is the state of things from the very top to the very bottom of this administration. And the impact of that is bleeding out into every aspect of the society and economy.”

Trump’s claim that he has ended six wars is pure fantasy, and as for his boasts that Europe and Japan are going to pay huge sums of money to the U.S.—which is not actually how trade deals work—the European Union and the U.S. have already published different versions of what was in the agreement between them, although that agreement itself was only preliminary.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

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