Presidential historian and frequent MSNBC and CNN talking head Douglas Brinkley joined former CBS and NBC anchor Katie Couric on her Thursday on her YouTube channel. According to Brinkley, President Trump’s Smithsonian Institute plans are some sort of Russian or Chinese-inspired attempt to rewrite history and bring back the era of “segregation of some kind.” Meanwhile, Couric unwittingly proved Trump’s point by suggesting that institutionalized racism today is as bad as it was in the days of slavery and Jim Crow.
Asked why Trump is doing what he is, Brinkley opined, “that President Trump is trying to whitewash history and that he has a long narrative you can follow in his life of seeming to want to be hard on black Americans.”
Brinkley also rejected Trump’s depiction of the Smithsonian, “So, there's a timeline if you go to the Smithsonian where they'll talk about slavery. You'll see shackles, you'll understand the horror of it, but it's also the triumphalism of the Civil War. They have at the Smithsonian, you know, Harriet Tubman's hymnbook, and then it follows black, you know, progress and there are fun objects there from Muhammad Ali in boxing or Chuck Berry's Red Cadillac or Romare Bearden's incredible Great Migration paintings.”
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