President Donald Trump wants Americans to see history his way, historians be damned.
On the one hand, Trump is actively trying to forbid any reevaluation of American racial history, on campuses and in museums, to spare the country any “national shame” for its stained past.
On the other hand, he is actively rewriting economic history to convince Americans that everything they’ve been taught is wrong and that his jarring new tariff policy won’t be the largest tax hike in American history, as some economists and fellow Republicans argue.
The accepted version of history, which you might, or might not, recall from Ben Stein’s history teacher in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” is that Congress raised tariffs with the Smoot-Hawley tariff act in 1930 in an effort to “alleviate the effects of the Great Depression.”
“Did it work?” Stein asked the class. “Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work and the United States, sank deeper into the Great Depression.”
Trump took the opposite view Wednesday, telling Americans that if only Congress had stuck to tariffs, the Great Depression “would have been a much different story.”
That Trump should need to goose up the facts to re-educate the population maybe shouldn’t be surprising from the leader of a movement built on a backward-looking promise to make the country “great again.”
“We have a 20th century president in a 21st century economy who wants to take us back to the 19th century,” wrote Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economics professor, on X.
Irwin is the author of multiple books, including “Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy.” We talked last year, when he gave me a crash course in US tariff history that bore almost no resemblance to what Trump told Americans on Wednesday.
