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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump used one of his last days in the White House on Monday to fight the Culture War, while President-elect Joe Biden observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day by volunteering to help to feed the needy.
With less than 48 hours of Wednesday’s inauguration, Trump ditched the heavily fortified capital while the White House offered no details on how the president was spending his last hours in office.
Banned from Twitter, Trump issued a Federal Holiday proclamation earlier Monday urging “all Americans to re-commit to Dr. King’s dream by engaging in acts of service to others, to their community and to our community. nation”.
His White House later released a 45-page document titled “The 1776 Report,” which claimed that “identity politics makes it less likely that racial reconciliation and healing can be achieved by pursuing Martin Luther’s dream. King, Jr. ”.
The report appears to be a response to the New York Times’ “Project 1619,” which traced the history of slavery through American history and became a lightning rod for Trump and the conservatives, who saw it as a attack on their view of American history.
The report, written by a group of predominantly white and conservative academics, claims the country’s founders hated slavery even though many of them owned slaves. This suggests that the Declaration of Independence ultimately led to the end of slavery in the United States, barely mentioning the decisive role of the Civil War in abolition.
Researchers beset the report, with a comparing to a “bad civic manual of the college of 1955” and another rejecting him as “a racist nonsense of the beginning of the XXth century, accentuated by a certain paranoia of the southern strategy and the cultural war”.
“Don’t open it, don’t delete the file, don’t burn your computer, and make sure you salt the ground wherever Commission members go,” added another.
James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, told NBC News he didn’t go past the table of contents and a single section title – “The American Mind” – before concluding that the report was a probable failure.
“There is no one American spirit,” he said. “This alone indicates that this report will not appreciate the diversity of ideas, cultures and perspectives that is one of our nation’s great assets.”
Citing a section of the report comparing affirmative action to ideas put forward by John C. Calhoun, a Southern politician and ardent advocate of slavery, Grossman added that the document is “offensive to Dr King’s legacy.”
The White House also issued an executive order on Monday playing out a similar deal, offering details of his proposed “National Garden of American Heroes,” an idea he first promoted last summer during the height of the world. demonstrations of Black Lives Matters and the removal of monuments honoring Confederate soldiers and other controversial historical figures.
The proposed garden does not appear to have the funding, location, or anything else to see it become a reality. The construction of new national monuments, even uncontroversial ones, often takes decades. The World War II memorial on the National Mall, for example, opened 17 years after its first proposal to Congress.
But Trump, who last month vetoed a military funding bill that would have renamed some bases named after Confederate generals, said the garden was “America’s response to this reckless attempt to ‘erase our heroes, our values and our entire way of life.
In his executive order, Trump said the garden would honor a semblance of 244 Americans, from Samuel Adams to Kobe Bryant, including non-Americans, like British director Alfred Hitchcock.
Meanwhile, Biden and his wife, along with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, have helped pack food for the needy at local charities.
Their inaugural committee called on supporters to participate in a national day of service on Monday, hosting some 2,500 service events across the country and hosting an online event with speeches and music celebrating King on Monday night.
Harris officially resigned his Senate seat at noon Monday, as scheduled. California Governor Gavin Newsom has called on outgoing California Secretary of State Alex Padilla to serve the remainder of Harris’ term, which ends in 2022.
“We are here today as part of what we collectively see, all of us who volunteered, as our responsibility as part of Dr. King’s legacy,” Harris told reporters as she volunteered. volunteering at a charity in Washington. “And we’re here to obviously renew the commitment we all should have to serve.”
Gallup, which has probed approval for the post of presidents since 1938, released its latest poll on the Trump presidency on Monday. He revealed that Trump’s popularity had reached a personal all-time high of 34% and that, on average, over his entire four-year term, Trump had the worst approval rating of any president.
However, other recent polls, including a recent NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll, found Trump’s approval rating to be largely unchanged.
Trump has not been seen publicly for days.
But first lady Melania Trump, standing in front of a blue lectern emblazoned with the presidential seal, delivered the kind of farewell speech on Monday that wouldn’t be remarkable in any other era, but which was remarkable now because her husband has until present refused to make a similar gesture.
“Be passionate in whatever you do,” Melania Trump said in a video of her remarks, weeks after the Capitol was stormed by pro-Trump rioters, “but always remember that violence is never the answer and will never be justified.
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