Trump, America and history

I keep thinking about Donald Trump's most recent interview with Fox News, in which he was asked what message he would send to Black Americans whose ancestors were held as slaves. His response:

My message is that we have a great country, we have the greatest country on Earth. We have a heritage, we have a history and we should learn from the history, and if you don’t understand your history, you will go back to it again. You will go right back to it. You have to learn. Think of it, you take away that whole era and you’re going to go back to it sometime. People won’t know about it. They’re going to forget about it. It’s okay.

Now this is a lot of nothing masquerading as something. We know that Trump's knowledge of history is limited, and I've argued that he doesn't really have a sense of history -- if he could think beyond today's news cycle, this hour's tweet, he might take very different actions with an understanding that history's eye is on him.

I've come to suspect, though, that Trump sees and tells American history like he tells his own -- it's a narrative, one in which inconvenient facts are omitted or glossed over, so that the story is one of ever-greater triumphs, never mind all those bankruptcies and unpaid workers along the way. The end of the story is now, and the end of the story is that he's rich, so he must have won, right? It is history as PR.

A fundamental dividing line in this country is between those who want history to be public relations, and those who have a more tragic sense of how events have proceeded. It is probably easier to get elected if you hold the former view. But the people with the latter view, in my estimation, probably have a more realistic understanding of the country we live in.