CNN commentator and New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman connected President Donald Trump’s push to strong-arm museums with the White supremacist riot in Charlottesville that sparked national outrage.
Trump has spent years defending Confederate monuments and pushing against problematic aspects of U.S. history, including widely-mocked purges of information deemed to be “DEI”-related. Most recently, he’s been leaning on Smithsonian museums to review and revise their content to reflect Trump’s views.
Haberman was a guest on Tuesday night’s edition of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, during which host Anderson Cooper asked for her insights on the museum push.
She traced the concept to Charlottesville, saying Trump “liked the idea of talking about heritage” in that context:
ANDERSON COOPER: So, where is this coming from in the White House? I mean, is this from the President himself?MAGGIE HABERMAN: This is from a lot of people around the President and encouraged by the President. As you noted, the President talked about this in 2020. He actually talked about that prior to 2020. The broader concept in 2017, when the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, happened and he started talking to aides about how he liked the idea of talking about heritage, and that became something that he would focus on in public addresses and public speeches. This is just a continuation of that.This is not necessarily a long held belief of Donald Trump, which is something
a lot of advisers have tried to insist. But it is a long held belief of a number of conservatives that they are upset about a focus on race, as you said, race and controversy around race and how Black people have been treated in this country is not really subjective. It just is — there are ugly aspects of the history.And so, Trump saying that, you know, people are being controlled or censored or cancelled, he is as you suggest, efforting some kind of a different approach, doing what critics would argue something similar.COOPER: Yes, I mean, we saw early on in the administration sort of these ham fisted efforts to purge all government websites that the Pentagon of any references to Black people or gay people you know, taking books out of the library at military academies by Black authors or about the Black experience in America, whereas, I think, The Times noted, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler was allowed to stay in. I think a Toni Morrison book was taken out. I think it was Beloved.Is there a sense of, I mean, is somebody in the White House themselves running point on this?HABERMAN: I think there are a couple of people in the White House who are running point on this. You saw that letter was signed by a couple of advisers. One is somebody who works in the Staff Secretary’s Office. One is Russell Vought at the Office of Managementand Budget. There’s a third who I’m not placing right now in memory, but there are a couple of people who are involved in this effort. It just goes beyond what we have seen, you know, where Trump is talking about campaign promises, right.He repeatedly said on the campaign trail, I’m going to end, you know, DEI. And this is something Republicans have talked about for a long time — diversity, equity and inclusion programs. And there were a lot of complaints from some of his corporate backers about those programs. I don’t know that people who supported him necessarily knew that this was going to be what he intended in terms of undoing aspects or rewriting aspects or rewriting what can be presented about aspects of the country’s history.
Watch above via Anderson Cooper 360.