America has never been even close to perfect, a fact the Trump administration is going to great lengths to obscure. They insist that any mention of the country’s flawed history demeans and ignores what it has done right, and therefore any failures must not be mentioned at all. In truth, President Donald Trump probably believes the simplified fables he learned as a boy in the 1950s — like George Washington and the cherry tree — are all anyone needs to know about American history. The consequences of this ignorance are putting the country, and the entire world, in grave danger.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously wrote in “The Life of Reason.” For instance, if Trump had an understanding of the Vietnam War —

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