This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 20 episode of “Morning Joe.”
When I was in law school, they often warned us about the dangers of a slippery slope, how one small action could set off a chain reaction, leading to a series of events you may have never even imagined were possible. Right now, Donald Trump is pushing the United States of America down that slippery slope.
Just consider his crusade against America’s colleges and universities. It started with attacks on affirmative action and the idea of equality itself. Those attacks on equality become attacks on diversity. Suddenly, diversity becomes a bad word in America.
But diversity is who we are. It’s part of the American identity — e pluribus unum, Latin for “Out of many, one,” is featured on our nation’s seal and etched into marble across Washington, D.C.
Other presidents understood the importance of diversity. In his final speech to the nation before leaving office in 1989, Ronald Reagan said diversity was the source of America’s greatness. He believed that when we stop being diverse, we will stop being great. Under Trump, we’ve abandoned that idea.
Instead of taking lessons from America’s past, the president is effectively trying to rewrite it. On Tuesday, Trump attacked the Smithsonian museums for their portrayal of U.S. history, calling it too negative and too focused on “how bad Slavery was.”
Trump then pledged to take the same playbook he used to target America’s universities to go after the country’s museums. “We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social. “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE.”
The arc of American history is extraordinary. It’s full of stories that need to be told. There are hopeful stories, like that of Abraham Lincoln, a man raised in abject poverty who dragged a racist, recalcitrant nation to emancipate Black Americans.
But America’s story is also that of a country that continues to move toward being a more perfect union, and sometimes we may take a few steps back. Those are stories that should not be ignored.
We must tell all of America’s stories to inspire future generations that no matter what we’re going through, we can do better and we can be better.