Trump and DeSantis, who are joined at the hip on this, are offended by any narrative that does not celebrate America as ‘shining city on the hill’
I have been struggling with precisely why I view the policies of the Trump administration as so awful and dangerous.
There’s no scarcity of reasons. For example: The tariff wars and a possible worldwide economic disruption; The abrupt cancellation of USAID to countries fighting epidemics, even letting medicine spoil in storage; Persecution of political opponents, the very weaponization of the Department of Justice he once railed against; Contempt for democracy and embrace of one-man rule as envisaged in Project 2025’s “unitary executive;” The racism and cruelty towards immigrants; Reversal of efforts to slow climate change; Normalizing hateful rhetoric and political violence; Ugly attacks on transgender people; And reversing decades of progress in women’s equality.
But my blood boils from a different cancer Trumpism has wrought. OK, call me a “pointy-headed intellectual,” but words matter, and I am offended when elected leaders show contempt for the truth and peddle obvious propaganda, and even lie to hide their bigotry.
Of course politicians of all parties have lied to disguise an unpopular policy or to extricate themselves from some embarrassment. Recall how President Lyndon B. Johnson’s hyped Gulf of Tonkin incident got us into the Vietnam War and George W. Bush’s phony “weapons of mass destruction” got us into war in Iraq.
But Trump and allies, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, lie to disguise their efforts to reverse cultural changes that have occurred in America since at least the 1960s – changes in race relations, the role of women, legal equality for LGBTQ+ persons, and the restrictions on government-sponsored religion. Many of their policies, regardless of reasonable-sounding explanations, are aimed at reversing these deeply resented changes in culture.
Two examples are illustrative: banning library books because they allegedly groom and sexualize, as DeSantis claims, and banning Rainbow Pride crosswalks, allegedly for safety reasons.
DeSantis has unleashed Moms for Liberty to scrub libraries of books they had mostly not heard of, let alone read, overriding everyone else’s freedom to read. Some addressed Black history, but most included mention of gay, lesbian or transgender themes. Florida now leads the nation in removing books from library shelves because someone in a community finds them objectionable.
Secondly, both DeSantis and Trump have ordered the erasure of “asphalt art.” Many Florida cities, including Key West, Gainesville, St. Petersburg, Orlando and Boynton Beach, have rainbow pride painted intersections.
The federal directive declares that “Roads are for safety, not political messages or artwork.” The Florida Department of Transportation memo threatens local communities with withholding funding if they don’t remove “surface markings, including pavement art installations.”
Unsurprisingly, facts interfere with the propaganda. It turns out that automobile accidents have decreased at intersections decorated with street art projects. How gullible do they think we are? Was DeSantis’s earlier ban on rainbow lighting on bridges designed to improve boating safety?
However absurd and bigoted these Trumpian-inspired initiatives, they are skirmishes in the coming battle between truth and propaganda. We ain’t seen nothing yet.
The coming conflagration involves Trump‘s effort to require the Smithsonian and all federal museums and parks to portray American history as it conforms to the president’s whitewashed fable of “American exceptionalism.”
Trump and DeSantis, who are joined at the hip on this, are offended by any narrative that does not celebrate America as “the shining city on the hill.“
But why should they feel threatened by the unvarnished truth in which racism and the enslavement of human beings preceded the creation of our nation and the American Revolution, and was later baked into our Constitution?
An honest reading of our history tells us that it took a catastrophic bloody Civil War and the post-war constitutional amendments to bring about a second American Revolution – what Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom.”
The next 150 years have been a “two steps forward, one step back“ struggle to extend the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and especially the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” to one group after another – from those who had been enslaved to the immigrants to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” that Emma Lazarus celebrated to Native Americans to those with disabilities and to sexual and gender minorities.
This story is not over. There will be injustices that will be uncovered and freedoms to be extended. Both Trump and DeSantis clearly reject this narrative. They see it as unpatriotic and inflicting shame. I find it an inspiring story. It also benefits by being closer to the truth.
Howard Simon served as the Executive Director of the ACLU of Florida from 1997-2018. He resides in Gainesville, and is president of Clean Okeechobee Waters Foundation.
