Donald Trump is messing with your memory

Programming note:
Salon news editor Charles R. Davis will be taking the reins of Crash Course while I am on vacation. If you’re a regular reader of Salon, you’re already familiar with Charles’ sharp analysis and commentary. I’m as excited as you all to see what he whips up!

The news, in brief …

• “There’s nothing they can’t do to you”: Carlson blasts Trump administration’s assault on free speech

  The influential conservative podcaster worried that Charlie Kirk's death will be used to curtail free speech. Read more.

• “Meaningless vanity project”: Senate Dems want Hegseth to pay for Defense name change

  Maryland senators introduced legislation to pull the cost of the Defense Department name change from Hegseth's budget. Read more.

• “The courts are being weaponized”: Democrats react to Khalil deportation order

  An immigration judge ruled earlier this week that activist Mahmoud Khalil be deported to Algeria or Syria. Read more.

• Democrats defend Kimmel, say FCC chair “disgraced” his office

  House Democratic leaders accused Carr of abusing his power to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Read more.

• Burning Man homicide victim died of “single stab wound”

  Police are still searching for a suspect in the August 2025 killing at the sprawling, desert festival. Read more.

Make me smarter …

Emails suggest that a Trump-friendly business is getting special treatment from the government

Emails show a Trump official intervening to help a Florida business owner who has been pictured with the president. Read more.

Eternal sunshine of the MAGA hivemind

If you read enough about it, you quickly learn that there’s very little objective truth in popular history. Viewing denizens of the past as monolithic believers in a flat Earth or the right to enslave humans falls apart under any contact with primary sources.

The veneration of Christopher Columbus in America can’t withstand a look at how he was viewed in his own time. The rampant violence of the Spanish conquistadors caused no small amount of theological and legal schisms back in Spain. English Puritans were not simpletons who believed they’d stumbled into an unpopulated Eden. They knew full well that the Native American whose villages they were squatting in had been decimated by plague.

Still, you can understand how the one-dimensional view of these distant groups became so popular. It was a long time ago. We’re teaching to a test. There’s not enough school year to teach a class full of nine-year-olds about the responses to the Reformation from the Catholic Church and European monarchs.

Excuses like that ring hollow, however, when half the country is insisting on an incorrect history of events we all lived through. When you encounter President Donald Trump decrying his own COVID-19 response or insisting the Democrats orchestrated a hoax inside the FBI he oversaw, it’s more than a little maddening.

Trump has long depended on the endless feed, a steady and overwhelming stream of news that obliterates context and memory in equal measure. (If you’ve ever looked up from your phone in a daze to discover that you’ve spent an hour scrolling through nothing, you know the feeling.) Trump adviser Steve Bannon called this strategy “flooding the zone with s**t” and our rambling president is particularly good at it. By the time you latch on to any one absurdity, Trump has weaved his way to his next lie. It’s ridiculous. It’s exhausting. It’s on purpose.

The discursive way that Trump runs the country tricks our minds in many ways. Beyond keeping his opponents exhausted, it gives his followers new ideas to be angry about in a steady Outer Borough-inflected drip. There’s no past, there’s only now, and it’s pissing us off.

The cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel by the Trump administration and loyal MAGA commentators only works in this ahistorical environment. You can pin the late-night host ouster on his fairly benign comments about the Charlie Kirk shooting, and only on those comments. But the rationalization falls apart if you can remember beyond yesterday. The idea that Kimmel’s cancellation is justice after years of Republicans taking it on the chin only works if you weren’t around for the end of “Politically Correct,” the sidelined careers of The Chicks, the incomprehensible free agency of Colin Kaepernick and the concentrated push against Bud Light.

The facts are still clear, if you can be bothered to see them: Trump has been calling for the cancellation of late-night hosts who are critical of his presidency for about as long as he’s been in office. There is nothing novel, no line that was crossed, in the reaction to Kirk’s shooting. The president has made a habit of threatening the broadcast licenses of networks he doesn’t like. He just needed a little help from the forces of capital to make his constant attacks seem the slightest bit more real, and Kimmel was history.

What do you think? Will we be able to remember the events of Trump’s era of American politics as it actually happened? Will the dual shocks of the pandemic and Trumpian politics leave history in shambles? Sound off in the comments.

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Before you go …

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