General Discussion

The idea that history is easily forgotten. Trump is attacking our short and long term memories as individuals, and our long term memory as a society.

As a personal example on the individual level, Trump's only been in office seven months, and I've already forgotten what he was doing six months ago.

Human long term memory isn't infinite, for most people at least. While some individuals do seem to have total recall capability, generally speaking, over time, we only remember the things that our brains think are important.

So in a normal presidential administration, this wouldn't be an issue, because most of the time you don't need to know what the president is doing on a daily basis. But Trump's method is to remain the center of attention each and every day, which overwhelms the brain's ability to separate what's necessary to remember, from what's not.

On a societal level, we don't just remember things we need to remember -- we remember things we choose to remember. We record moments in human history because it helps us to agree on where we came from and use that knowledge to move forward.

This is why Trump's attacks on museums are so insidious. He'd like to change what we, as a society choose to remember -- what we've decided is important to us. He would like us to remember history differently -- so that things like slavery, or the civil rights movement, or his assault on the Capitol Building, never happened.