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CNN —
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.”
Bored Kids in the Classroom
Why is Trump rewriting US economic history? Anyone?
