Trump Unleashes Stalinist Vandals on Smithsonian Museums

Readers’ Forum –Trib Star, 8-23-25

Nightmares turned into realities

Get to the Smithsonian museums as soon as you can. President Trump is heading up a review of exhibits at these wonderful, professionally managed museums. Can this be a good thing?

The president plans to scour wall texts, websites and social media. As the official announcement puts it: He is going to reach into our past “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”

And when questioned about just what he specifically means by the “tone,” “historical framing” and “American ideals,” he will respond with his usual self-congratulations. Get ready to hear something like this from him: I know the best tone and the best framing. I’ve been doing great toning and framing all my life. And I’m the one, the only one really, who so many around this country, really around the world, come to when they want to know about American ideals.

Everyone who reads serious literature is re-reading George Orwell’s “Nineteen-Eighty-Four.” In the novel, Big Brother uses fear and force to control people and fit them to the regimes’ needs and will. Another novel along these lines compliments Orwell’s classic in an important way.

Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” creates a world of compliant, satisfied masses. This is achieved through the relentless administration of the drug Soma to the nation’s population. Through Soma conformity is assured, social unrest is tranquilized and a kind of temporary bliss is induced. People live in a haze, you might say in a “Great Again” dream-like state.

Big Brother — force and fear. Soma — history framed and aligned.

Fictional dystopian nightmares are being turned into the political realities of today. We can hope that someday the Smithsonian National Museum of American History will mount an exhibit detailing these hard times for the historical truth.

— Gary Daily Terre Haute