I learned early in life no matter how bad or awful things are they can get worse. I also learned “things” includes people. When it comes to Trump’s pettiness, like his other bad qualities (seriously, does he possess a single good one?) the same thing applies. His butt-hurt over being the ONLY President to have been Impeached TWICE has led to him forcing the Smithsonian to remove mention of it from a display on Presidential Impeachments! Face it folks – we have a spoiled, petulant whiny-a$$ed crybaby as President.
I know I shouldn’t be the least bit surprised by this. This is after all Donald Trump we’re talking about and despite his mental decline slights and insults are still clear in his mind. He was furious over his first Impeachment and you just knew he’d never, ever get over it. I’m surprised he didn’t have a stroke when he was Impeached the second time. Trumpty likes to think he’s got the most of damned near anything you can mention. THIS however, being the ONLY President to have been impeached more than one time is not the kind of ‘distinction’ he wants! Hell, it’s a short and dubious list to be on. Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, with Nixon usually included due to the committee vote. He resigned before the full House could complete the process because Barry Goldwater went to the WH and told him he was toast in the Senate.
So three Presidents prior to Trump got hauled up by the House. None were convicted in the Senate (though Nixon would have been) but it’s still a wound that will be seen in every historical account of them. Right in the first paragraph. In Trump’s case it will be noted he’s the ONLY President to have suffered the indignity of having Articles of Impeachment approved TWICE. Well, try as he might that history is out there and known round the world. No matter what he does that historical fact will remain known. There’s not a damned thing he can do about it.
What he CAN do is try to repeat his tactics with Jan. 6 and gaslight much of the country into believing it wasn’t an insurrectionist riot. Just a bunch of ‘peaceful protesters’ joined by ‘tourists’ who decided to roam around the Capitol. We saw it with our own eyes. Hour after hour of violence and vandalism. So did the rest of the world. They watched a repeat of Germany’s Reichstag Fire. There were no TV cameras back then. But there were plenty on Jan. 6 and news outlets from around the world with DC Bureaus making sure it was shown round the world.
Here at home however even before he was sworn in again Trump had Fox News and other RWNJ outlets selling HIS version of that awful piece of our history and the roots of his lie got parked deep in the minds of MAGA. It worked so well he’s now trying to do the same with his two Impeachments. As the Washington Post tells us the mention of Trump in the display on Presidential Impeachments was recently removed:
A temporary label including content about Trump’s impeachments had been on display since September 2021 at the Washington museum, a Smithsonian spokesperson told The Washington Post, adding that it was intended to be a short-term addition to address current events. Now, the exhibit notes that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.”
In addition to describing Trump’s two impeachments, the temporary label — which read “Case under redesign (history happens)” — also offered information about the impeachments of presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, as well as Richard M. Nixon, who would have faced impeachment had he not resigned. The Post viewed a photograph of the temporary signage.
Now that display has returned to the way it appeared in 2008, according to the Smithsonian spokesperson.
According to the linked article a source not authorized to speak on the record says this came about due to a “content review” the Smithsonian undertook after the WH pressured them to remove an art museum director. ON the record the Smithsonian claims that once it’s ‘properly completed’ the Trump section will be included with all the others. Like hell it will! At least not until Trump is out of office. And if we don’t retake the WH not even then. In the meantime Trump’s efforts to scrub U.S. history of any mention of his Impeachments will continue. Mark my words, those who produce textbooks will get pressure to rewrite this piece of history about Trump in U.S. History sections! Since Texas is I believe still the largest producer of texts for K-12 don’t be surprised if they go along. That means for years textbooks will be out there that omit the historical fact Trump is a TWICE Impeached President. And in fact the ONLY President to have had Articles of Impeachment approved against him more than once.
Hopefully the linked article doesn’t wind up behind a paywall as so often happens with the WaPo and NYT. There’s a lot in their story beyond what I’ve talked about here and it’s worth your time. It’s yet another example of how much Dictator level stuff Trump is getting away with. He’s been literally trying to rewrite history since he was sworn in the first time. First it was erasing Obama’s legacy. So we knew he’d do the same with Biden’s. He (and Melania) have been butt-hurt over other President’s legacies, especially JFK and Jackie. Melania may or may not have come up with the notion to sterilize Jackie’s iconic Rose Garden but it was one of the few tasks she undertook as First Lady she relished. Trump has just completed ruing the once lovely and unique setting by turning it into a Mar A Lago type patio.
I wrote yesterday how he’s redoing the interior of the WH too. From his literal gilding of the Oval Office to a major renovation to create a Mar A Lago imitation ballroom he’s on a mission. What’s next? Replacing the Presidential Portraits in that hallway with portrait sized Trump greeting cards? As part of his renovations to the East Wing a room dedicated to honoring him as the greatest golfer who ever lived? I shudder to think of the humiliation he’d heap on living golfers who actual do rank among the game’s greatest. Forcing them to act like his Cabinet and singing his praises!
I also think this connects to him taking over the Kennedy Center and getting someone to sponsor legislation renaming it for him. He’s already had the opera theater renamed for Melania who I doubt can name even three or four classic operas. Hell, one could make a case the REAL reason RFK Jr. is part of the administration is an attempt to erase all the class and grace of the so-call Camelot years. And convince people the Trump family is who to think of rather than the Kennedys. Being known, at least in the U.S. as a twice Impeached President definitely doesn’t fit the image of himself Trump is trying so hard to create.
I don’t know what he’ll pull next but we can be sure he isn’t done. He won’t be until he’s taken his last breath. If you want to know why I’m agnostic Trump is a good example of why if there was a God, at least a loving and caring one Trump didn’t succumb to COVID. Or had a heart attack or stroke that would at least incapacitate him by now. But he’s got if not Ronny Jackson a medical team that holds him together with duct tape and baling wire and pumping him with drugs to amp him up or calm him down as the situation of a given moment requires. Which allows him to continue desecrating our country including our history. So, this is one more thing to add to the long (and getting longer by the day) list of things someday we’ll have to fix.
**********
Zoomers, if you can spare some change to keep the Little Political Blog That Could trekking through cyberspace, we appreciate it. This has been a dim and grim year compared to others before it. All we’re trying to do is survive until things get better. Thank you. Ursula
Fix??? He’s the guy the country voted for after four years of stealing it the first time with Russia helping. Then after pardoning those who could testify, lying nonstop, playing golf a FULL YEAR OF HIS OFFICE, and deliberately destroying 6000 children’s families, then he lied fours years undermining our democracy. Fix? I think he’s the perfect leader for this racist shallow ignorant country that pissed on all the graves of our military dead. Fix? I don’t think it’s fixable.
I don’t see that we have a choice but to try. I think you’re probably right in that some of the damage is unfixable. It would take a couple of generations of the kind of widespread decent public school education we had prior to Reagan to have a population where the bulk of folks were well-educated enough to have critical thinking skills. You and I will be dead and gone, and there’s no telling what the country and world will look like then. About the only thing we can be sure of is that the U.S. will NOT be the mostly unquestioned leader we were for most of yours and my lifetimes. That shift is already underway. Europe and other allies gave us a Mulligan with re-electing Baby Bush in 2004 as we got Obama as President twice. Also, in both 2000 and 2004 the elections were close. If not for our dumbass Electoral College system there wouldn’t have even been a first term of Baby Bush.
But then came Trump and an election in which both major Party candidates were underwater in approval ratings. Although Clinton was a clear winner of the popular vote less than 80k votes in a few key states swung the election to Trump in the EC which is the vote that counts. Not that it was all that great a margin. So our allies (and enemies) saw us twice in sixteen years install a President who lost the popular vote. (Gore had 500k more in 2000) A look at a map and those huge swaths of ruby red states in relatively sparsely populated regions with single digit electoral votes gives our batshit insane GOP a huge built in advantage in both control of the Senate (and therefore approval over Presidential appointments) and the Presidency. California is the biggest EC prize and New York has become fairly reliably blue in Presidential politics but Texas is a big ass red gorilla and Florida is almost a lock for the GOP.
THAT is what our allies (and enemies) realized in 2020, when Biden beat Trump’s ass by more than double what Clinton did, yet wound up with a small EC margin identical to the one Trump got in 2016! MAGA will still have to be reckoned with when Trump is gone – either certifibly crazy to the point where the 25th is invoked or he dies. Other countries see this, and how our country which once had a strong public school system has had it intentionally dismantled by conservatives (to their advantage) and it’s sunk in that every four years the word and reliability of the U.S. is up for grabs.
That’s a sobering thought to those of us old enough to have lived decades when it wasn’t this bad. Many of us tried to sound the warning but were ignored. Now, even what’s fixable is going to show big ass and ugly scars. A reminder to the world we are no longer the country that shaped the 20th century and led it to victory in World Wars and in science & technology but just another country. At best.
Can it be done by us and those who will come after us older folks? I don’t know but again I don’t see any choice but to try like hell to get us back on the right track. I don’t have children of my own but I DO give a shit about those who do, and future generations. I know some other folks like me who never had kids who feel the same way I do. And lots more who have kids that will have to live in the wreckage that’s been (and will continue until Trump is gone) wrought since Trump got into elective politics.
“Mark my words, those who produce textbooks will get pressure to rewrite this piece of history about Trump in U.S. History sections! Since Texas is I believe still the largest producer of texts for K-12 don’t be surprised if they go along. That means for years textbooks will be out there that omit the historical fact Trump is a TWICE Impeached President. And in fact the ONLY President to have had Articles of Impeachment approved against him more than once.”
Well, for what it’s worth, even the mention in American textbooks is likely to go unnoticed even if it is included. I graduated from high school many decades ago (I won’t mention the exact year but it was closer to the end of WW2 than it is to today) and even though our US history textbook included information past the moon landings, our actual classwork just barely got to WW2–and that was with nine months of class time. We basically covered from Columbus to WW2 and this was an era when the textbook was pretty, um, Eurocentric (or, more accurately, Anglocentric–little mention of other Europeans other than the Spanish or French explorations and settlements in Florida, the Southwest and the Mississippi and Ohio valleys) with major glossing over of the treatment of the Native peoples and the slave trade (beyond the most incidental and least disturbing information–the anti-woke people would most likely have approved of this textbook). The bulk of our class time, though, covered Jamestown and Plymouth then skipping to the Revolution through the Monroe Doctrine before having a relatively brief stint with the Civil War and Reconstruction before popping to the Spanish-American War then to WW1, the Depression and ending with WW2 (even that was fairly glossed over since we got to it about two weeks before final exams).