Top Trump aide: Who really cares about slavery?

Lindsey Halligan, special assistant to the president, fixes an earring at the end of an interview outside of the White House on Aug. 20.

A senior White House official thinks the Smithsonian museums are way too caught up on that whole slavery thing.

During a Wednesday appearance on Fox News, White House senior associate Lindsey Halligan discussed President Donald Trump’s push to make the renowned museums parrot his racist, revisionist history of the United States. After conceding slavery was “awful,” she quickly pivoted to underplaying it and chastising the museum.

“What I saw when I was going through the museums personally was an overemphasis on slavery. And I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we've come since slavery,” Halligan said. “Our country is a country of progress, and it's the greatest country in the world. And we should be able to take our kids, our students, through the Smithsonian and feel proud when we leave. There's a lot of history to our country, both positive and negative. But we need to keep moving forward. We can't just keep focusing on the negative.”

Halligan's "Don't Worry Be Happy"-style monologue echoes her boss’ insane remarks on social media, criticizing the Smithsonian for being “WOKE” and overly focused on “how bad Slavery was.” In July, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History briefly scrubbed mentions of Trump’s first two impeachments from an exhibit on presidential impeachments and resignations, though it later added them back in a strongly modified form. 

The White House also plans to rewrite history across the Smithsonian ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, which will be celebrated next year.

Similarly, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense has purged Black American military heroes from its websites.

The ongoing white supremacist project to rewrite history and underplay the significance of slavery—which dominated U.S. history and prehistory—is one of the administration’s most ignoble pursuits. It dishonors the hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers who gave their lives fighting for a more perfect democracy.