Trump Thinks American History Is Too “Woke.” Now He Wants to Reduce Focus on Slavery in Museums.

On Tuesday afternoon, the president once again tried to put his banana pants on over his head. This time, his topic was the nation’s museums and his plans to shake them down the way he did the country’s elite colleges and universities if they don’t stop being “WOKE.” This, of course, is a concept he doesn’t remotely understand—among many, many others—except as a kind of primer cord to set off the primal fear in Meemaw and the others he has invited into the third-rate haunted-house exhibit of his mind.

The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of “WOKE.” The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made. This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE.

Yes, and that exhibit on the interstellar slave trade that replaced Apollo 11 at the Air and Space Museum was very disturbing. That installation with the animatronic drill thralls from Triskelion scared the quatloos out of several small children standing nearby.

All mockery aside, this is a genuine threat to the small museums all over America founded and staffed by people with that gloriously American enthusiasm for things about which many people have never had an inkling. For the road-tripping sportswriter, whose daylight hours largely were their own, these tiny places were godsends. I have a wall thermometer in the shape of a guitar from the Jimmie Rodgers Museum in Meridian, Mississippi. Back when I was doing a couple weekend shifts a month down at ESPN Radio, I’d stop at the Carousel Museum and the American Clock & Watch Museum, both of them in Bristol, Connecticut.

What worries me most are the hundreds of small museums dealing with all those parts of American history that make the president feel icky—the Nicodemus National Historical Site out in Kansas or the Lest We Forget Museum in Pennsylvania or the beautiful little museum at Wounded Knee. These places don’t have anywhere near the wherewithal to resist if and when the Eye of Sauron falls upon them. And what of Bryan Stevenson’s extraordinary Legacy Museum in Alabama, which describes itself this way:

Travel through a comprehensive history of the destructive violence that shaped our nation, from the slave trade, to the era of Jim Crow and racial terror lynchings, to our current mass incarceration crisis—and find inspiration in our soaring Reflection Space and world-class art gallery.

If there’s anything guaranteed to draw the attention of the fourth-rate ambulance chasers from White House legal stables, it’s something that talks about “racial terror lynchings” without mentioning how important they were as community gatherings in small-town America.

Woke is broke, and we’re a joke.