Author: Heather Cox Richardson

Donald J. Trump talked to reporters on August 25 as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also, as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise. Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting...

Donald J. Trump created a firestorm on August 20 when he said that the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, located mostly in Washington DC, focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.” But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not simply White supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation’s voting system to create a one-party state. That ideology took shape in the years immediately after the Civil...

On July 23, the X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an 1872 oil painting by John Gast, titled “American Progress.” Gast represented the American East on the right side of the painting with light skies, a rising sun, and the bustling port of New York City, full of ships. He painted the American West in darkness, through which bison and Indigenous Americans flee the people in the middle of the painting: white hunters, farmers, settlers, and stagecoach riders. Over the scene floats a giant, blonde Lady Liberty, evidently moving west, carrying a schoolbook...