Donald J. Trump created a firestorm on August 20 when he said that the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, located mostly in Washington DC, focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.”

But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not simply White supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation’s voting system to create a one-party state.

That ideology took shape in the years immediately after the Civil War, when Black men and poor White men in the South voted for leaders who promised to rebuild their shattered region, provide schools and hospitals (as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans)

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