The New Yorker:

Ahead of next year’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the White House has issued a directive to the Smithsonian.

By Jill Lepore

In 1976, the year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, Donald J. Trump, thirty, leonine, and three-piece-suited, was chauffeured around Manhattan by an armed laid-off city cop in a silver Cadillac with “DJT” plates, while talking on his hot-shot car phone and making deals. “He could sell sand to the Arabs and refrigerators to the Eskimos,” an architect told the Times. That architect was drawing up plans for a convention center that Trump hoped to build in midtown. Trump called it the “Miracle on 34th Street,” promising a cultural showpiece, with fountains, pools, a giant movie theatre, half a million square feet of exhibition space, and rooftop solar panels.

On the Fourth of July of that red-white-and-blue year, the Tall Ships—a flotilla of more than two hundred vessels from more than a dozen countries—sailed into New York Harbor. Three days later, Trump was in Washington, D.C., presenting to the city’s redevelopment board his plan to build another gargantuan convention center, this one near the U.S. Capitol. Encountering stiff resistance, according to the Evening Star, a visibly “miffed” Trump left the meeting “in a huff.”

The paper did not report whether, before leaving D.C., Trump stopped by the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology to tour its thirty-five-thousand-square-foot bicentennial exhibition, “A Nation of Nations.” Five years in the making, it told the twinned stories of American union and disunion with five thousand objects, from a Ute flute and Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves to a Klan robe and a sign that read “Japs Keep Out You Rats.” The show aimed to demonstrate how people “came to America, from prehistoric times to the present,” and “how experiences in the new land changed them.”

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