"I chose this moment to visit the museum because I wanted to see if President Donald Trump’s criticism of the Smithsonian was just his latest expression of resurgent white nationalism — or whether he had a point...
The bottom floors are devoted to, as Trump put it, “how bad Slavery was” — befitting a chapter that not only defined the Black experience in America, but also figured centrally in the Civil War and the country’s social unraveling in the 20th century. No half-intelligent or half-moral person could find anything good to say about slavery, but neither could anything about the museum’s exhibits be construed as anti-White...
I didn’t leave the museum mourning for my country. I left it, as I suspect most of the tourists around me did, stunned by the brutality of American racism but also marveling at the distance the country has traveled — even if we occasionally fall back along the way.
And this is where I fundamentally disagree with Trump and his little band of cultural revolutionaries. I, too, stand by the concept of American exceptionalism, which a lot of my Democratic friends reject as jingoistic. But the Trumpists get its meaning entirely wrong.
America is exceptional not because God wills it so, or because it has the strongest military, or because capitalism is the best economic system on Earth (although it probably is). We are exceptional because we aspire to an ideal that we know can never be met...
What Trump is doing now — trying to sanitize that story, perhaps because he is incapable of admitting fault himself — is the antithesis of what makes America exceptional. To put a happier, less discomfiting spin on the exhibits in this museum would make us more like Russia or China or North Korea, or any other country where history becomes a strongman’s self-serving fairy tale that no one outside the country believes.
We laugh at those strongmen and their mythologies. A generation from now, if I’m right about the pace of our history and the enduring strengths of our country, we’ll laugh at Trump, too."
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