His place seems assured—potentially as this country’s worst President.
The latest shameful step is his demand that National Park Service employees buy and wear—or the NPS buys and gives employees to wear==Trump’s Freedom 250 pins instead of the decorations from the Congressionally-established America 250 Committee. Mother Jones reports any worker refusing the do so could face disciplinary action.
It means that NPS employees working on the National Mall for the “Trump rally” better be wearing pins from which the President will make a profit—or else.
Trump already has turned the National Park Service into his history propaganda machine. His removal of signs, exhibits, films, and other portrayals of our history and replaced them (if he replaced them at all) with Trump-politically correct versions of history. Court filings indicate at least 37 NPS sites have been affected.
A federal judge had ordered the restoration of the items to their original places by July 3. An NPS spokesman says the agency is not sure that’s enough time to get it all done.
The arrogance of Trump’s Ozymandic quest was put on huge public display a few days ago when a giant poster was unfurled on the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building showing TR’s face and a quotation attributed to him: “Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength.”
The problem is that Co-Director Michael Patrick Cullinane of the Theodore Roosevelt Center told Huff Post, “What I can say for certain is that the quote did not originate with Theodore Roosevelt.”
The Washington Post did an article about it, which prompted a representative of the Office of Personnel Management, that occupies the building, to say the quotation “is commonly attributed to Roosevelt and captures the spirit of the federal workforce.”
(or at least what is left of it after the Trump-Musk eviscerating of numerous federal agencies.)
The comment from OPM’s Laurine Pinover is reminiscent of a quote attributed to President Warren Harding: “I love Paul Revere, whether he rode or not.” (Paul Revere was one of two riders who rode to Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that the British Army was advancing in that direction. Revere was captured early in the event, questioned, and freed after being questions. William Dawes was the one who spread the alarm but who is forgotten because his last name does not rhyme with “Listen my children and you shall hear…”)
Pinover dismissed the article: “As excited as we are about America 250, it’s surprising the Washington Post has taken such an interest in our small agency’s building banners.”
The newspaper notes that there’s another banner alongside Roosevelt’s image that promotes Trump’s Freedom 250 efforts to rewrite history in general.
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library gives us a far better statement that he really did make—to the Iowa State Teachers’ Association in November, 1910:
“Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty. No kind of life is worth leading if it is always an easy life. . . . I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
It’s not something Donald Trump—who has had an easy life but has made the lives of millions of people difficult—would understand. But this one is true, something else Donald Trump doesn’t understand, either.