Exhibits in the Smithsonian are changed. Removed. New exhibits appear that reflect what someone in power wants to be true rather than what is true. Textbooks are rewritten. Lies are spread as though they are gospel.
This is not new. The powerful have always tried to control the record.
People in power want to be remembered on their own terms. They erect monuments to themselves. They rename things after themselves. Trump put his name on the Kennedy Center — because he could, until he couldn’t. His signature on the currency. A denomination bearing his image. Golden statues of himself erected on golf courses like pharaohs building pyramids in the desert.
The instinct is as old as power itself. Control the story. Control the monument. Control what the children are taught. Control what future generations believe happened.
There is one thing the despots of today didn’t fully account for.
The information age.
There are people who swear the Holocaust never happened. That it is propaganda. That six million deaths are a fiction invented by the enemies of the Reich. But we know better. Because so many others — from so many countries, in so many languages, with cameras and documents and testimony — recorded what actually happened. The ash was still in the dirt nine years after liberation. I know. I was there. And no amount of denial changes what was documented by everyone watching from outside the borders of the lie.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is documented so completely by so many independent sources that denial is simply a fool’s errand. The truth exists in too many places to be erased from all of them simultaneously.
This is what Trump and every authoritarian before him ultimately cannot solve.
January 6th is on video. Watched live by the world. Archived in a thousand places he cannot reach. Election denial is documented in court filings, in sworn testimony, in the words of his own attorneys admitting in writing that the claims were false. His medical records exist somewhere. His financial records exist somewhere. The decisions made in that gilded bunker are being noted by people he cannot fire and cannot threaten.
He can rewrite the American textbook.
He cannot rewrite the Canadian one. Or the German one. Or the British parliamentary record. Or the archives being maintained right now by every allied nation watching this unfold and taking careful notes for their own historians.
The victors write history — but only where they are.
Beyond those borders the truth has already been recorded. In languages he doesn’t speak. In archives he cannot reach. By governments and journalists and ordinary citizens who understand exactly what they are watching and have decided that someone needs to write it down honestly.
He can hide in the bunker.
He cannot hide from the record being assembled everywhere else.
The truth doesn’t need his permission to survive.
It just needs somewhere to live.
And it has found plenty of places.
When all is said and done the only person who will actually believe his version of history is Trump himself.
