Noted documentarian Ken Burns, along with historian David McCullough, started a Facebook group yesterday called Historians on Donald Trump. Like all Ken Burns documentaries, the videos are highly informative and slightly boring but in a cute way that’s kinda fun. Right now the page contains 19 ~three-minute videos of historians doing very academic takedowns of America’s latest doofy demagogue, Donald J. Trump, and they are amazing.
“He’s clearly a charlatan,” says Kai Bird, which is clearly academese for “fuck this dude.” But, unlike so many who toss off insults all the time (me!), Bird goes on to describe why it’s such a bad thing for Trump to be a charlatan and a clown: “…Because Mr. Trump is so clearly a clown, some people may conclude he’s essentially harmless. But farce can become dangerous. Farce can become national disaster.”
“The issue is sense verses nonsense, sanity versus insanity, civility versus catastrophe,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis says.
But the videos aren’t ALL basically a collection of scholarly insults with a few anecdotes. Vicki Lynn Ruiz provides a short history of that time between 1931 and 1935 when “over one-third of the Mexican population were either summarily deported by immigration authorities or were persuaded by duplicitous social workers to leave.” Ruiz claims that 60 percent of those people were U.S. citizens by birth.
Of course, Trump can dismiss these historians as puny eggheads etc., and that’s fine. The fact that these historians so often use their Serious Professor Voice, that voice a doctor uses before he or she gives you the bad news, scares the shit out of me and makes me want to vote. Hopefully it will do the same for others.
Though these historians do disagree on a few points, e.g. “we’ve never seen this kind of thing before” vs “we have seen this kind of thing before,” the thesis that binds these arguments together is “don’t underestimate Trump.”
