Another Step Towards Fascism— Trump's Shuttering Of The JFK Library
Maybe at one point it was funny that Trump supporters tend to not be book readers and that so many of them are functionally illiterate. But it isn’t funny any longer. In 2016 when he thanked the “poorly educated” for his election win, we should have guessed that eventually he’d be coming down libraries… maybe a prelude to book burning and re-writing history?
Yesterday a quintet of Washington Post reporters wrote that “The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston closed abruptly Tuesday afternoon, with staff escorting visitors out of the building after the Trump administration ordered the firing of five employees that were critical to its operation. The library, which is run by the National Archives, at first said it would remain closed indefinitely.”
After pushback, Trump relented and the library re-opened on Wednesday. “The rapid closing and reversal illustrates the broader confusion and chaos stemming from Trump’s efforts to slash the size of the federal government… Members of the Kennedy family blasted the Trump administration for the fallout. ‘Closing government libraries to try to fund a tax cut for the wealthy seems like a really bad way to balance the budget. But par for the course for this administration,’ Joe Kennedy, a former congressman and the grandnephew of the former president, said in an interview. ‘This is either, to some extent, being pushed by the richest man in the world, who is largely at one point dependent on government contracts for [a] significant part of his work for Space X, Tesla and others, now gutting programs that are used by everyone,’ Kennedy added. ‘The hypocrisy is stunning.’ Jack Schlossberg, Kennedy’s grandson, criticized Trump and his new Department of Government Efficiency in an Instagram story posted Tuesday afternoon. Schlossberg serves on the committee of the John F Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, the library’s annual public service honor. ‘This is a direct attack on our past to rewrite a new future— yet another example of stealing history from the American people,’ Schlossberg told The Post. ‘It has nothing to do with government efficiency. The probationary officers who were fired generate revenue for the federal government. This will limit public access not only to the museum and public spaces, but also to the archives and records of the Kennedy administration.’”
MAGAts probably never read it but Orwell’s 1984 was meant as a warning, not a playbook. In his dystopian vision, the Party controls history itself, rewriting the past to serve the present, erasing inconvenient truths, and reducing complex ideas to simplistic slogans— “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Trump and his allies may not have the intellectual discipline to carry out a totalitarian vision with Orwellian precision, but the impulse is there: a visceral hostility to knowledge, history and any form of truth that contradicts their narrative. The abrupt closure of the Kennedy Library is just the latest in a long line of attacks on institutions that preserve facts and challenge propaganda. If history has taught us anything, it's that leaders who fear knowledge inevitably turn to suppression.
From the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s to Stalin’s purges of intellectuals and historians that we looked at yesterday, authoritarian regimes have always understood that controlling access to information is key to controlling a population. Not in the slightest put surprisingly, Putin has turned Russian history into a weapon, outlawing any discussion of Stalin’s crimes and labeling dissenters as foreign agents. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s fascist government has systematically rewritten history textbooks to paint a rosier picture of fascist collaborators. And in Florida, Ron DeSantis has banned books, whitewashed slavery in school curricula, and cracked down on academic freedom— all under the guise of fighting “woke” ideology.
Trump, of course, lacks even the flimsy intellectual justifications that other autocrats use for their war on knowledge. His attacks on libraries, archives, and education are rooted in something even baser: personal insecurity and the desire for blind loyalty. To him, history is whatever flatters his ego in the moment. His movement thrives on ignorance, feeding on a combination of resentment and manufactured outrage. The Kennedy Library fiasco isn’t just about JFK’s legacy— it’s about a broader effort to strip America of its historical memory, to ensure that future generations don’t have the tools to recognize when democracy is being dismantled in real time.
The MAGA base has been primed for years to accept whatever nonsense Trump spews, no matter how easily debunked. His latest lie— that Ukraine started the war with Russia and that Zelensky is the real dictator— is straight out of the Kremlin’s propaganda playbook. But MAGA-world laps it up without question because they have been systematically trained to reject critical thinking. This is the logical endpoint of a movement that has declared war on history, expertise, and reality itself. When you burn books, gut education, and attack institutions that preserve knowledge, you create a population incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction. And that’s exactly what Trump and his allies want.
Putin, Lavrov and the Russian state have spent years crafting a revisionist history where Ukraine is to blame for its own suffering, where Russia’s invasion was “defensive,” and where Zelensky— an elected leader fighting for his country’s survival— is somehow a tyrant. That Trump is parroting this nonsense should surprise no one. He has never cared about truth, only about what’s useful to him in the moment. But the fact that his followers accept it so uncritically is a testament to just how deeply detached from reality the MAGA movement has become.
This isn’t just about Ukraine— it’s about the broader authoritarian instinct to erase and rewrite history. Trump’s assault on libraries and education is part of the same strategy that fuels his lies about the 2020 election, about COVID and now about a deranged foreign policy. The goal isn’t to win an argument. The goal is to make truth itself irrelevant, to drown facts in a sea of propaganda, and to ensure that his base remains obedient, enraged and blind to the real dangers facing democracy. In 1984, Orwell described a world where history was rewritten daily, where wars shifted with political convenience and where the people were too brainwashed to question it. We are watching that play out in real time.
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