Trump's revisionism

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Steve SchmidtJan 21, 2025342

Donald Trump debased the American presidency as surely as Franklin Graham debased his father's memory and Christianity during the most loathsome inaugural ceremony in American history, in which one man's derangements were celebrated as our national destiny to the cheers of some of the richest and most corrupt people in the world.

It was a bad day in America, and a sad one, but also one chosen by 49.9 percent of the country, which wanted change, and so it is change that they will get.

Donald Trump told the world that America is going to be an empire and the world's most powerful taker. He said our military exists to make war, not keep the peace. He said that he will expand American territory by force if necessary.

He all but declared war on Panama.

Trump told the world a mythological story about America, leaving out many chapters that contain for us important lessons from the past that are the key to surviving the future. Trump's speech was less a celebration of the American story, and much more an erasure of it.

He told a story about America lifted from Frontierland at Disney circa 1962.

The United Stares is a young country, while being the oldest constitutional republic in the world.

America did not always exist as it does today. That is true in several regards, most importantly are the extension of equal protections under the law — if not in reality — to every race, creed and woman that had been written out of American liberty and denied equal citizenship with the right to vote.

But it is also true territorially.

Look at America in 1800.

John Adams was president. The western boundary of the United States stopped at the Mississippi River:

America had grown from 2.5 million people — two million free whites, 30,000 free blacks and 500,000 slaves — at the end of the American Revolution. By 1820, the American population would top 10 million people.

Approximately 400,000 Americans lived west of the Appalachian Mountains in 1800.
By 1820, the number would be more than two million.

The great westward migration was underway.

Can you imagine what it all looked like?

Ken Burns helped me imagine what this would have looked like before the slaughter of the buffalo by the tens of millions in the 19th century by the white settlers and the US Army:

He described it as the American Serengeti, filled with grizzly bears, cougars, elk, moose and bison; a North American Garden of Eden, where the Indigenous peoples of North America lived in harmony with nature for 600 generations.

Think about that. Six hundred generations.

The United States has existed for seven to 12 generations depending on how you count a generation.

Think about the reality that Donald Trump told a story of the United States in his inaugural that stripped the American Indian from the American story. Of course, his omissions change nothing — except to reveal his ignorance is as deep as his malice and as extreme as his cabinet.

The Americans of that era of conquest and migration had a great lack of appreciation for government authority, which decreased exponentially when they encountered other national authorities, like those that were Spanish or Mexican.

The 19th century was a savage century of war, conquest, subjugation, and the largest slaughter of warm-blooded animals in human history.

The purpose of the slaughter was to starve and subjugate the Great Plains Indian Nations until they were forced into impoverishment on reservations. More than 50 million animals were slaughtered in a holocaust of killing that made all of God's creation weep.

We did that.

It should be remembered.

Shouldn't it?

The last fighting that took place between the US Army and Indian warriors took place in the last quarter of the 19th century.

It was the last combat that would take place on American soil and the last acts of war waged by the US Army on American soil — not withstanding the fighting that took place on the Mexican border in the early 20th century.

When 1800 dawned, France, England, Spain and Russia claimed vast territories on the North American continent that bordered the United States of America. The French saw the writing on the wall and sold their possessions in 1803.

The US doubled in size in an instant with the Louisiana purchase. It also began 20 years of savage fighting over control of Florida, which was claimed by two powers, the Seminole Tribe and Spain. Florida would become a slave state, and later a Confederate State, and then later a segregationist one.

When it became American territory in 1821, it had been a sanctuary to escaped slaves who became integrated and free with the Indigenous tribes that had gathered in Florida, fleeing British expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Those were the Seminoles, and three wars were waged against them by the United States over more than 40 years that ended on the eve of Civil War. These are the wars that made Andrew Jackson a national hero.

The America that existed between 1800 and 1820 was exploding in size and wealth and heading west, always west.

The European powers existed in a state of perpetual warfare that George Washington had warned about avoiding at all costs.

The United States and Great Britain fought a second vicious war in the second decade of the century, and despite best efforts, the United States could not prevail on British/Canadian soil.

Nothing has changed between then and now. Our multiple attempts to liberate the Canadian people from the British monarchy has always come to naught.

The final boundaries between British North America/Canada were settled under threat in 1846 from James Polk and his war slogan of "54-40 or fight."

Today's border, set at the 49th parallel, marks the longest and most enduring undefended and peaceful international boundary in world history — the boundary between the United States and Canada. Like everything in the 19th century, it was shaped by violence, war, bluster, and threat.

The dominant American political ideology of the era became known as "manifest destiny," and it held that the United States of America, guided by the hand of providence, was predestined to spread and control the entirety of the territory between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

In the end, the most powerful nation won control of the territory, and once it was held, there would never be another foreign power to take it back from the people who claim it — the very fierce people of the United States.

What happened in 19th century America is that the dominant economic and military power settled all questions around its authority and power to control its sovereignty. It was a brutal era of history filled, like always, with both shame and glory.

A great American Civil War was fought from 1861-1865. It was the first true war of the Industrial Age, and it prefaced the horror of total war in the 20th century.

That war was led and fought by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the United States and Confederate Armies, as well as the freed slaves over which those armies fought.

Great railroads were built during the 19th century. They were built on the backs of Chinese laborers, who flooded into America through its west coast ports. There was a time when there were hundreds of time zones in America. Every town and village set its own clocks, but the necessity of rail schedules changed that.

The country we know today was being built. It was being connected. Hundreds of thousands of people headed west into territories beyond the reach of government.

There, the final confrontations took place between the great and noble Indigenous nations and their nomadic way of life that had persisted for thousands of years until first contact with European settlers. Just as the Sioux had displaced the Crow, the United States was about to displace the Sioux.

Gold, oil, coal, machines, engines, hydraulics, steel, and imagination hurled America forward in a 100 years' time to become one of the Earth's preeminent powers. By 1900, the boundaries of America were settled and the population was 76 million strong.

It was the Americans who were born 100 years ago in the early 1920s who charged onto the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima. These were the grandparents of Generation X Americans and some millennials. They were born just outside the shadow of the 19th century.

There seems to be a lack of curiosity in the American character around what just happened, as opposed to what is coming next. Perhaps it is a mark of national impetuousness that Americans seem mostly oblivious around the concept that America today is inexorably connected to America's past.

It remains an astounding fact and great piece of trivia that John Tyler, born in 1791, and the 10th president of the United States, whose treachery delivered him to service in the Confederate House of Representatives, has a living grandson in 2025. His name is Harrison Ruffin Tyler, and he is 96 years young. He is the only American alive whose grandpa was born when there were 13 states.

There is an accompanying arrogance that rides comfortably with obliviousness and ignorance.

It gives license to people in the present who know nothing of the past to indict the totality of the struggle for justice and progress against a present standard that is as deluded as it is preening.

It is also not cost-free.

There is a cost for fighting over the past, which cannot be changed, and it is a terrible one. The fight costs the future, and strangles the imagination needed to create it.

Yet, there are occasions where great injustices can be recognized, repudiated, and a new beginning forged with mutual grace, joy and achievement.

During the 19th century, the United States government signed and broke hundreds of treaties with tribal nations that were recognized as co-equal and sovereign in their standing with the American government.

This deserves remembrance because it helps contextualize the evil of Trump's threats against the sovereignty of Panama and Denmark. The breaking of treaties isn't just lawless, but it shames the national honor, and yokes us to the nation's worst abuses and deepest sins as if we have learned nothing from them.

The United States of America will celebrate its 250th birthday next year.

It should be an epic occasion — a celebration of freedom, liberty, sacrifice and the courage of our ancestors.

Yet, it should also be an occasion for deep humility and gratitude with a real reckoning around the reality that both American freedom and prosperity remains elusive for people through discrimination and the legacy of historic persecution.

It should be an occasion where we renew the climb to the summit of the mountaintop from which Dr. King saw the shining city on a hill.

America's destiny, future and promise is deeply linked to the building of that city. It is neither illusory or imaginary. It is as real as Dr. King, who saw it as clearly as he described it in his prophetic vision. Our shared destiny is to build the city.

There is an ironic tragedy around the celebrations that will mark the birth of the greatest republic and greatest force for human dignity in world history.

The celebrations will be presided over by a man who cares nothing for the values and principles being celebrated. In fact, he will think the jubilation is for him, and not for us.

Donald Trump is America's high priest of malice. He is a revanchist prophet with native cunning and a talent for bombastic demagoguery and shamelessness that makes clear a lack of conscience has been a vital factor in his rise during a low age.

Within 100 years' time, the United States of America buried George Washington, and stood at the edge of human flight, mass electrification, steel battleships, hygienic medicine, and scientific discovery that is the basis for this modern era.

America is always becoming, evolving, changing, even while surging forward into a new era.

American freedom is defended by the Armed Forces of the United States. It is the most powerful and lethal military in world history.

It is a volunteer force comprised of men and women from every inch of American territory, comprising every faith, creed, race and ethnicity on Earth.

It is bound together by a set of values that are character-based, and a common cause, which is the United States of America, That nation cannot be understood — let alone known — without understanding the greatness of its Native American tribes, their history, defiance, struggle, contribution and magnificent patriotism.

Apache, Black Hawk, Kiowa, Comanche, Chinook, Lakota are the names of the great tribes.

The US Army has named their helicopters after them. They are named in honor of the warrior spirit and fierceness of those tribes' heroic struggles and fierceness. They are named after the tribes because of the wisdom that has strengthened the United States that comes from the wisdom of our Indigenous peoples.

Native Americans aren't a peripheral part of the American story. They are a core part of it, and so are Native American values.

For instance, the greatest attribute of a warrior in Lakota culture was not fierceness, deadliness or victory.

It was humility.

The Democratic Party should embrace a season of humility while it prepares for a season of fighting back against a malevolence that has gathered, and has already begun acting.

Humility will be required to listen.

Listening will be required to hear, and hearing will be required to obtain wisdom.

There is great wisdom in the culture of America's native peoples who have forged this nation from its first hours.

Harmony is at the center of much of American Indian belief.

The white man has much to learn from this. There was a Lakota word for "white man" that roughly translated as "fat taker."

There are many fat takers in 2025.

They are not America's destiny. They are America's gravest threat.

What happens tomorrow in America is decided by us, not gravity, a cabal of tech billionaires, or a king — or at least it used to be that way.

Should it not be the case any longer that there is no higher moral mission in American life than the restoration of liberty from the teeth of a new type of tyranny that is marked, not by the thud of jackboots, but rather the clacking of keyboards?

The restoration of harmony in our society will be a monumental task after four years of Donald Trump, yet it must be pursued with the same determination to remove from power what is now consolidating it at a rapid pace.

What is old is new again in America. In some sense, we have arrived back at the beginning.

There is a question hanging in the air again.

Perhaps it would be good if I look back to the first instance of it being posed almost 250 years ago.

Elizabeth Wiling Powel could not vote. The 19th Amendment and Suffrage movements didn't exist in a country not yet born.

Powel was a politician's wife. She was married to the mayor of Philadelphia and a fixture of Philadelphia society.

She was close to General Washington and his wife Martha.

It was Powel who asked Ben Franklin the question that elicited the famous and oft-quoted answer from our most important founding elder, ''A Republic if you can keep it.'

Powel fired back, "And why not keep it?"

Dr. Franklin responded, "Because the people on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good."

There is no Ozempic to sate the appetites of the people in American politics. What cures a belly full of malice, selfishness and indifference is idealism, fighting spirit and purpose.

My friends, we will not go gently into the night and fade to silent while our birthright is taken and desecrated. No way.

Dark nights show the stars, and that is all that is needed to chart a new course — an American course built on the foundations of human dignity, rights, and human freedom.

I am just one voice, one American, but I have a request for all whom I reach, and particularly for every reader who is not an American.

For the Americans, I ask that you stay involved, engaged and committed to the duties of citizenship. You have no right to surrender them in the face of adversities that would have made our ancestors scoff.

For our friends from across the world, do not confuse the American people for the Trump government. Do not give up on us as we will not allow the predations of our sick commander in chief to be realized. We are your friends, and will always be. The threats come from a weak man who thinks they make him look big. They don't.

A clown who storms a castle does not become a king, he just turns the castle into a circus. All circuses end — sometimes when the lions eat the ringmaster.