CNN Host Trashes Trump’s Slavery Argument in Emotional Takedown
Abby Phillip torched the president’s announcement that he’s going after the Smithsonian for being “woke.”
CNN host Abby Phillip ripped into President Donald Trump’s claim that the “woke” Smithsonian focuses too much on the evils of slavery.
Trump, 79, made the complaint in a social media post on Tuesday, writing, “Everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been—Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
He wrote that he had instructed his attorneys to go through the national museums to eliminate “OUT OF CONTROL” wokeness, without specifying which museums he was targeting or which types of exhibits he opposed.
Phillip began that evening’s episode of her show by calling out the president for pushing the same “shocking” argument that a panelist made on NewsNight last week: that museums focus too much on the role of white people who participated in slavery.
President Trump has set out to remake America's cultural institutions in MAGA's image, including the Kennedy Center for the Arts and now the national museums.
Carlos Barria/Reuters
“It‘s important to say, objectively slavery was indeed bad. It was evil, the nation’s original sin,” Phillip said. “And it is impossible to understand the true history of this country without fully grappling with slavery’s impact.”
During her introduction, she described how Black men, women, and children were forced onto ships and bound by collars that ripped off their skin—which one victim described as “iron entering our souls”—and then forced to work “by way of the whip.”
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They were “starved, sleep-deprived, threatened, tortured physically and psychologically. They were auctioned off, humiliated, fearful and separated from their families and their children,” she continued. “Black women and girls were raped and sexually assaulted. Many were brutally murdered and mutilated.”
The abuse endured for centuries, and even in places where slavery wasn’t legal, institutions such as banks and universities were built on enslaved labor, and even white people who didn’t own slaves benefitted from the caste system it created, she argued.
Trump raged this month that the Smithsonian National Museum of American History included an exhibit about his two impeachments during his first presidential term.
Kevin Carter/Getty Images
“When we acknowledge the existence of Black people who operated George Washington‘s Mount Vernon, or the Black hands that built the White House, we are acknowledging the existence, the perseverance, and the contributions of the souls that white supremacy sought to erase,” Phillip said.
True history should include everything—even the horrors—and museums must “protect those stories,” because they inform the present day, she added.
During the panel discussion, the show’s regular conservative commentator Scott Jennings tried to put a positive spin on President Trump’s words.
Jennings emphasized that slavery was a “reprehensible institution” and agreed it was the nation’s original sin it was “a good thing” that Americans fought a war to eradicate it. But what Trump is asking, Jennings claimed, is whether the U.S. will be defined by its worst moment, or by what it has done since then.
Today, the exhibits and reenactors at George Washington's plantation in Virginia, Mount Vernon, tell the stories of the enslaved people who lived and worked there.
Robert Alexander/Getty Images
“I think he believes there is an effort by some to continue to try to define us from our worst moment, instead of try to focus and define us based on our best moments, which started when we eradicated slavery and began to move forward as the light of the world,” Jennings said.
Another panelist, however, pointed out that the Smithsonian and other museums don’t just describe the horrors of slavery—they also show the resilience of Black Americans, who led the fight for emancipation.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture—which Trump toured and praised when it opened in 2017—tells a fundamentally American story about the quest for democracy, said Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor of history at John Hopkins University.
“For the president, I think, to just simply erase that and push that away… tells us that this is part of a much larger agenda… to erase things that the country is not comfortable with,” she added.
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