Photo by Roman Kraft, Unsplash
Photo by Roman Kraft, Unsplash
Donald Trump can go to Bedminster or Mar-a-Lago to play golf for the weekend, but when Monday comes around, and everybody goes back to work in Washington D.C., the big empty box will start filling up again.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
The thing that Donald Trump doesn’t realize about Washington D.C. is that it is a big empty box. Every morning, tens of thousands of people get in their cars or on the Metro and go into town and start filling up that empty box. Trump’s nightmare is that what they will fill the box with is history.
Everything in Washington is history. You can’t escape it. The city itself is history, with its historical buildings like the White House and the Capitol and the Lincoln and Jefferson and Washington monuments. Even the Mall is lined with museums—the Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum, the Museum of African American History and Culture—on and off the Mall, museums fill the city with more history, more art, more records of what has gone before.
History is being made every day in federal buildings scattered around the city in a giant campus of government. Our attention was drawn today to a little corner of the history made in Washington when the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the Department of Labor, issued its jobs and unemployment report. U.S. employment went up by only 73,000 jobs in July, far less than economists and market watchers had expected, and the unemployment rate ticked up slightly.
Donald Trump flew into a rage and fired Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, accusing her—without evidence, as is said again and again every day about Trump’s assertions—of “rigging” the data to make him look bad.
See, in the morning, the box at the Department of Labor was empty. By 9 a.m, however, it contained newly generated history, the employment statistics that Trump suspected would tank the market and hurt him politically.
That’s the problem with living and working in a big empty box. Nearly every day, the box gets filled with history that Trump doesn’t like. Recently, it came to his attention that his two impeachments were recorded in a display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Someone leaned on the leaders of the Smithsonian, which undertook a “content review,” according to the Washington Post, and the references to Trump’s two impeachments were removed.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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