The 47th President and the Post-Biden World 2.0

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A report from a cryptocurrency analytics firm details how those who bought the Trump memecoin have fared, with most retail investors having lost money while sophisticated traders did better.

Nearly a Million Investors Lost a Total of $3.8 Billion on Trump Crypto Coin (No paywall)

This has been a week with several major Supreme Court decisions. One of those cases, Slaughter, illuminates much of what we’re going to be talking about today: unchecked executive power that is being enabled by the Supreme Court.

Right now, with Donald Trump back in the White House, that unchecked power is enabling all sorts of corruption, crony capitalism, and the appointment of people to key government positions because of financial donations and political loyalty—not because of competence.

I want to tell you the story of the screwworm outbreak in America, what it has to do with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, and how it connects to Christian nationalism.

What we’re seeing over and over again is that many appointees now overseeing vast government programs have little expertise in the agencies they lead. In Rollins’ case, she oversees SNAP, the program that helps feed mothers and children across America who would otherwise go hungry.

Instead of expertise, these officials are rewarded for loyalty. That incompetence is obscured by political messaging, by immense personal wealth, and often by stories rooted in Christian nationalism and romanticized myths about rural America.

The Screwworm Outbreak

The screwworm outbreak sounds like something from a horror movie, but it’s very real.

The New World screwworm is a parasitic fly that lays its eggs in livestock and other animals. According to the CDC, those eggs hatch into larvae that consume the flesh of their host, often leading to sickness or death.

This is catastrophic not only for farmers and ranchers but for our entire food supply.

Screwworms are typically found in South and Central America. They had not been found in the United States since 1966—until cases emerged in Texas and New Mexico at the beginning of June.

As of June 25, the USDA had confirmed 25 total cases and 22 active cases in animals.

This week, members of the New Democrat Coalition—many representing rural districts or red states—asked the USDA to provide more information about the outbreak and demanded that the Trump administration devote additional resources to containing it.

In a June 24 letter to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, lawmakers highlighted ranchers’ and farmers’ growing concerns about the effects on livestock health and food prices.

Food prices are already consuming more and more of Americans’ budgets. I certainly know this—I have two boys at home, one of them a teenager and one almost a teenager.

Anything that contaminates our food supply affects farmers, ranchers, and every family trying to afford groceries.

The lawmakers wrote that they wanted greater transparency and more departmental resources, saying:

“It’s time, Brooke Rollins, to take responsibility for events that occur under your leadership and move forward to improve the situation.”

According to reporting from States Newsroom, a USDA spokesperson rejected the suggestion that the department wasn’t communicating enough.

The spokesperson declared:

“The Trump administration is the most transparent administration in history.”

That statement feels unmistakably Trumpian. It also foreshadows the larger story.

Who Is Brooke Rollins?

To understand this situation, it’s worth understanding Brooke Rollins.

I also want to pause to acknowledge something about modern farming.

My own family has rural roots, and I spent three years serving as a Lutheran pastor in rural Minnesota among farmers, ranchers, factory workers, and farm families.

The reality is that it’s incredibly difficult today for small farmers to survive.

Many families struggle with debt, alcoholism, addiction, accidents, and tragically, suicide.

Often farming becomes a second job because families cannot make the numbers work.

Many rent land because buying it has become impossible. They share equipment because new machinery is prohibitively expensive.

That is the reality for many American farm families.

Now compare that with Brooke Rollins.

In Texas there’s a phrase:

“All hat and no cattle.”

It describes people who wear expensive cowboy hats and boots and present themselves as ranchers, but whose lives bear little resemblance to those actually doing the work.

Rollins’ public biography says she grew up in a small Texas town and participated in Future Farmers of America.

But a closer look paints a different picture.

Her mother, Helen Dean Kerwin, became a Texas state representative in 2024 after defeating an incumbent Republican over support for school vouchers.

Her family background was rooted not in farming but in the hotel industry.

Her father spent years working with Hilton before the family purchased a hotel.

Her mother later owned a flower shop, became mayor, served on county commissions, and owned both a ranch and a bed-and-breakfast.

The story begins to look much different from the image often presented.

Then there’s Rollins’ husband.

Mark Rollins is president of HKN Energy, an oil and gas company operating in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

He previously worked at Petrogrowth Energy Advisors, KPMG, and Arthur Andersen.

That takes us a long way from the image of the Texas family farm.

Political Loyalty

In April 2021, just months after January 6, Brooke Rollins co-founded the America First Policy Institute alongside Larry Kudlow.

The think tank became instrumental in preparing policy and personnel for a second Trump administration.

Rollins served as president and CEO until becoming Agriculture Secretary.

She and her husband have also made documented political donations and hosted high-dollar Trump fundraisers.

Taken together, this suggests that Rollins’ appointment resulted primarily from political loyalty—not from deep agricultural expertise.

Meanwhile, as the screwworm outbreak worsened, Rollins first blamed Joe Biden.

Later, speaking to CNBC, she dismissed the screwworm as “only a little pest.”

Those two characterizations are difficult to reconcile.

Christian Nationalism at USDA

Another part of Rollins’ story deserves attention.

Earlier this year, federal employees sued over what they described as unconstitutional religious coercion inside the USDA.

The lawsuit alleged that Rollins regularly sent increasingly proselytizing emails to USDA employees, promoting her preferred form of Christianity to a captive government workforce.

The plaintiffs represented a wide range of religious backgrounds and no religious affiliation, including Jewish, Buddhist, Pagan, and atheist employees.

The lawsuit, filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Democracy Forward, argued that these communications violated the separation of church and state.

The practice reportedly culminated in an Easter message declaring:

“The greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith and the abiding hope of all mankind.”

The email went on to proclaim:

“Jesus has been raised from the dead, and God has granted each of us victory and new life.”

It included artwork depicting the empty tomb and the words:

“Christ is risen.”

Whatever one’s personal faith, this is an extraordinary message for the head of a federal agency to send to government employees.

When asked about the lawsuit, a USDA spokesperson responded:

“While we do not comment on pending litigation, we will keep the plaintiffs in our prayers during this process.”

The Bigger Picture

So where does all this leave us?

We’re facing a genuine agricultural threat with the screwworm outbreak.

We’re also living through a political moment in which the Supreme Court is granting presidents broader authority to appoint loyalists to positions of enormous responsibility.

Many of those appointees appear to owe their positions more to political loyalty and financial support than demonstrated competence.

And when questions arise, they are often answered not with transparency but with political messaging.

I’ll close with a story from Scripture.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath after being criticized by religious leaders.

He asks them:

“If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?”

They had no answer.

Today we have leaders who claim to govern according to biblical values while pulling back assistance that feeds hungry mothers and children, threatening our food supply, and obscuring serious problems with political loyalty instead of confronting them honestly.

That should concern every American—especially those who care about rural communities, farmers, and the integrity of our public institutions.

Going into the weekend during which Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of the day on which the Second Continental Congress accepted the Declaration of Independence, President Donald J. Trump was facing a whole lot of bad news.

There was the war on Iran. On Thursday, after U.S. Central Command said regional leaders in the Middle East were committed to the “free flow of commerce” in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s military command said that any ships trying to cross the strait on unapproved routes would be met with a “forceful response.” The U.S. has been urging ships to use a route close to Oman, but Iran’s warning caused ships to turn around.

Iran was part of the story of the economy. The choking off of the roughly 20% of the world’s oil that flowed through the Strait of Hormuz until Trump launched an attack on Iran has caused inflation to spike in the U.S. On Wednesday, July 1, Trump’s new hand-picked chair of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, told the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking that “prices are too high.” With inflation over 4%, Warsh also reiterated that the Fed would continue to hold its goal of no more than 2% inflation, suggesting that the interest rate cuts Trump wants so badly are not going to happen any time soon. Currently there is talk of raising interest rates later this year.

In addition to concerns about stringency in the oil markets, Joe Hernandez of NPR reported on Friday that the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz also affected transport of about one third of the world’s fertilizer transported by sea. Shortages hurt farmers around the world, including in the U.S., where farmers were hit with skyrocketing fertilizer prices during planting season. An April survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation reported that 70% of respondents said they couldn’t afford all the fertilizer they needed for the season.

Hernandez reports that higher fertilizer prices are just one of the reasons that consumers will see higher food prices this fall.

And then there were the stories about corruption. On Tuesday, new financial disclosures showed that Trump has made an eye-popping $1.4 billion in his family’s cryptocurrency ventures since he took office. On Thursday, Trump appeared to feel the need to defend those profits, telling CNBC: “There’s nothing illegal. There’s nothing wrong with it I could know.” Julia Manchester of The Hill noted that Trump went on to say that the nature of the presidency means that his children “have inside information” about almost any business decision they make. He said: “Almost anything they do, if they want to buy a truck, if they buy an energy efficient truck, they have inside information.”

There are specific legal prohibitions against using insider information for benefit in stock trades and financial transactions.

And Trump appears to have fleeced his own followers. On Saturday, Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times reported that as of the end of June, nearly a million people who bought Trump’s memecoin lost a total of $3.81 billion while Trump walked away with $636 million. Trump took transaction fees up front, so he made money no matter what happened with the coin. For his followers, though, his advice that “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” and to “Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW!” cost them dearly as the coin slid from trading at $75.35 to trading at $1.76, a drop of 97%.

On Thursday, Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources released a report accusing Trump of cheating the American people at large by diverting donations that donors intended to make to the nonpartisan America250 program to his own Freedom 250 organization. After failing to take over America250 entirely, the report charges, Trump’s people created Freedom 250 within the National Park Foundation. By using a known and popular public charity as cover, Freedom 250 could attract donations while operating outside the transparency and accountability rules Congress required for America250.

The report suggests that Trump officials gave donors intending to donate to the bipartisan America250 routing and account numbers for Trump’s Freedom 250. They also took most of the money Congress appropriated for the America 250 project; in June a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Michael Scherer of The Atlantic: “Spending taxpayer money on frivolous, poorly attended events and D.C. consultants who are trying to get rich off America’s 250th is the exact opposite of what was intended. This administration will not light taxpayer money on fire. Full stop.”

But Trump officials routed that money to favored contractors, including the firm that helped to organize Trump’s rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, before attendees stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, told reporters: “I’m a lawyer, and I know better than to pronounce that a crime has been committed. But I do know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s Freedom 250 focused on promoting his 250-foot-tall triumphal arch at his Great American State Fair on the National Mall. Recurring problems with Trump’s renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool marred that celebration as the pool turned green with algae and then pieces of the pool’s new coating began to break loose. Administration officials accused vandals of causing the damage. They put fencing around the pool and had National Guard troops patrol it.

The Great American State Fair opened on June 25 after a number of musical acts backed out, saying they had been misled into thinking the event was backed by the bipartisan America 250. Once open, the fair was plagued with electrical issues, sparse exhibits, and heat. A model of the proposed triumphal arch looked cheap and quickly began to come apart. Visitors were few and far between, and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that aerial images of the empty mall so enraged Trump that White House officials deleted them from official and personal social media accounts.

And on June 25, in response to a lawsuit by journalist Katie Phang, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered acting attorney general Todd Blanche to produce key documents from the Epstein files by July 2 or show cause why the Department of Justice is refusing. On July 2 it refused to produce the material, saying its redactions and omissions were within the scope of the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

On July 3, Fifty Plus One, which tracks Trump’s job approval rating, reported that 59.1% of Americans disapprove of his performance while only 37.5% approve.

And so, on Friday night, the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Trump flew to South Dakota to deliver a speech at Mt. Rushmore in which he claimed he and his supporters are at war against an enemy here at home: communists.

Before his trip to the state, Trump posted a video showing his own likeness on a golden sculpture of Mt. Rushmore, alongside the images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, with the voiceover saying: “I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” The video opens with the text “Art of the vision” spelled out over an American flag, an encapsulation—although perhaps an unintentional one—of how Trump has maintained political power by selling a false image to his followers.

Trump began his speech with a series of feel-good platitudes: “These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations, everybody…. We are a nation of dreamers and believers, warriors and explorers, doers and fighters…. There has never been anything like us anywhere on earth.” And then he tied together MAGA’s white nationalism with the claim that Trump’s political opponents want to destroy the economy.

Trump clearly thinks there is political gain in convincing his followers that his political opponents are communists, although this is a lie made up out of whole cloth after the victory of Democratic Socialists in Democratic primaries and the popularity of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Communists call for the end of private ownership of the means of production, giving the state control of private enterprises. In today’s America, it is actually Trump, himself, who is taking government stakes in private enterprises.

Democratic Socialists are not communists or socialists, who want to see the end of private property. Democratic Socialists call for a robust system of private enterprise, alongside government control of the aspects of society required for people to participate in the economy on a level playing field. While Democratic Socialists embrace a wide range of policies, they generally don’t think schools, or medical care, or roads, should be profit-making industries.

In that, they echo Americans from the 1860s, when the Republicans established public colleges, or the 1900s, when Theodore Roosevelt called for public health insurance. Indeed, what today’s Democratic Socialists call for is much more limited than what the Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted in 1956, when the top income tax bracket in the United States was 91%.

Nonetheless, on Friday Trump tried to convince Americans that “there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.” “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations,” he said. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.”

He went on to say: “They don’t want good. They don’t love God and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion and they don’t want religion and they won’t have it.… They have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition, or your God-given rights. It’s an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder…. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

His false vision of the U.S. is aimed at the midterm elections. “America will never be a communist country,” he said. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise.” He went on to demand that the Senate end the filibuster and Congress pass the voter-suppression SAVE America Act. If they do, he said, “we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

On July 4, hundreds of masked white supremacists in khakis and blue shirts, carrying Confederate flags and flags with the logo of the neofascist white supremacist group Patriot Front, marched in Washington, D.C., chanting “Reclaim America.” The White House did not respond to a query from Gloria Oladipo of The Guardian about whether Trump condemns the march.

Trump continued his attacks on “communists” in a late-night speech on the National Mall after thunderstorms temporarily shut down his planned rally. “[A]ll these talks from the communists, they haven’t got a chance,” he told the drenched audience members, “not even a chance. We don’t want communists in our country.”

Trump’s drop into an anticommunism that exaggerates even the excesses of the McCarthy era seems to indicate panic rather than confidence. Today, July 5, he began posting on social media at 1:21 AM and over the course of the day posted more than 100 times, attacking Democrats and boasting extravagantly of what he says are his own successes while demanding Congress pass the SAVE Act or lose the presidency forever.

Trump’s people appear to be trying to push Trump’s vision, but it doesn’t seem to be sticking.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows today, insisting that the problems with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the work of vandals who have gashed its surface in multiple cuts that equal the 350 feet Trump claims and that there is video evidence, although the administration, which is famous for spinning everything to its own advantage, is choosing not to show it.

When CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether they actually had photographs of people cutting a gash in the liner, Burgum danced away from the question after commenting, “I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not…”

And so the 251st year of American democracy begins with reality reasserting itself.

Nah. Nonsense.

Last week, U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team forward Folarin Balogun, the team’s top scorer, received a red card in a World Cup match against Bosnia-Herzegovina, suspending him for today’s game against Belgium. Then, on Sunday, the Disciplinary Committee of the international soccer governing body FIFA made a surprise announcement, saying that Balogun would be allowed a year-long probation, enabling him to play on Monday.

Almost immediately, Sophia Cai of Politico reported that White House FIFA World Cup Task Force executive director Andrew Giuliani, the son of Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, told President Donald J. Trump about the suspension. As officials from the U.S. Soccer Federation prepared and submitted an appeal to FIFA, Giuliani and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick offered White House lawyers and dug into the professional history of the referee who had made the red card call. Then, on Thursday, Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino, with whom he has been friendly for eight years.

On Sunday, FIFA cleared Balogun to play on Monday. The last, and only, time a red card went unpunished before was in 1962.

The suspension of the suspension has created an international outcry although, as the Associated Press pointed out, this is only the latest step in a pattern in which Infantino appears to have been interfering with the independence of FIFA’s judicial and disciplinary bodies.

The Belgian soccer federation is challenging the ruling. “Regardless of the sporting outcome of the match,” it said, it was “deeply concerned by the way these events have unfolded and will continue, in the hours, days and months ahead, to pursue every available avenue to uphold the fundamental principles of ethics, sporting fairness and the interests of football as a whole.”

The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has called the decision “incomprehensible and unjustifiable.” “When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined,” it said. “Football is the most loved sport in the world because it is a beautiful game and is trusted because it is played everywhere with the same laws.”

But a world in which playing fields are level is not the world Trump wants. He wants one in which people in power can ignore the rule of law for their own ends.

Today, at the White House, he told reporters: “So I saw the play. And I’m a person that loves sports and was a good athlete. And I understand sports really well. Really well. And that wasn’t a foul. That wasn’t even an infraction. That was two guys running full speed that happened to crash into each other…. No, these were two great athletes that got tangled up, and this referee, who— is a little bit suspect— if you check his, if you check his past.”

“[Balogun] didn’t do anything wrong, and he’s our best player or one of our best players, a very— vital player, and he gave him a red card. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t think it meant much. Then I started hearing that that means he can’t play in the next game, at least in the next game. I said, Boy, that’s a big— You know, if it happened to another player, it would have been unfair, but when they take your best player or just about, they have some great players, but, and they say, you can’t play. That’s very unfair. That’s, you know, it’s one thing to penalize somebody for the game. But how do you penalize them for a game that hasn’t been played yet? is very unfair. You can’t do that. So, yes, I asked for a review by FIFA.

“I spoke to a man who’s highly respected, and, by the way, whose level of respect has gone up tenfold, and he was good before this started. But, you know, he really pushed it in this country.” And then, Trump was back to his usual grievances. “I’m the one that got them to do it. It was not Biden. Biden was asleep. I got him to do it. In fact, it was very sad because I got him to do it. And if the progression was normal, I would have been retired. Now, the Democrats are saying, Man, we should have just let him have his way, he would have. We would have had him gone, but I said, you know, the saddest thing is, I got the Olympics, and I got the World Cup.”

The president of the United States pressuring the president of FIFA to change the rules for his favored player perfectly represents the way Trump thinks about the rule of law in the United States. And the rejection of a level playing field shows in the way Trump and the Republicans have skewed the U.S economy so only their team can win.

Almost exactly a year ago, on July 4, 2025, Trump signed into law what he called the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It passed both the House and the Senate without a single Democratic vote, making it a signature piece of legislation for Trump and his party. As Shannon Pettypiece and Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News reported on July 1, there was a “seismic shift” at the heart of the new law: it extended about $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to corporations and wealthy Americans over ten years while cutting about $1.1 trillion from healthcare and food assistance programs that serve poor and working-class Americans. It also adds about $4.7 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.

Public policy scholar Chris Howard noted that the law so dramatically rolls back the modern government constructed during and after the Depression and World War II, from 1933 to 1981, that it amounts to “Robin Hood in reverse.” “It deliberately targets some of the most vulnerable members of society,” he told Pettypiece and Hixenbaugh, “while providing huge windfalls to the richest individuals and to big business.”

After the economic free-for-all of the 1920s led to the Great Crash and the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats began the process of creating a modern state that established a level economic playing field. They created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, protected civil rights, and supported a rules-based international order. Then Republican president Dwight Eisenhower built on the foundation the Democrats built. Members of both parties supported such a system, recognizing that without a level economic playing field that made sure everyone had the ability to succeed, a few men would monopolize the nation’s wealth and power.

Their inspiration for creating a government that kept the economic playing field level came from those before them who had seen what happened when a few wealthy men controlled the government. In the early twentieth century, when corporations dominated the economy and their millionaire owners threw their weight into political contests, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt fulminated against that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”

He insisted that America must break up this class in order to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” He called for government to regulate business, prohibit corporate funding of political campaigns,

and impose income and inheritance taxes. He demanded a “square deal” for the American people.

In late 1901, financier J.P. Morgan joined the nation’s main railroad interest into a giant new conglomerate designed to get around antitrust legislation. In February 1902, Roosevelt’s attorney general told reporters that the formation of the Northern Securities Company was illegal and that he would be suing it. Businessmen were aghast, not only because Roosevelt was going after a business combination but also because he had acted without consulting Wall Street. When J. P. Morgan complained that he had not been informed, Roosevelt told him that that was the whole point. “If we have done anything wrong,” said the astonished Morgan, “send your man [the attorney general] to my man [one of his lawyers] and they can fix it up.” The president declined.

“We don’t want to fix it up,” explained the attorney general. “We want to stop it.”

As the Boston Globe put it: “‘Justice for all alike—a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor,’ is the Roosevelt ideal to be attained by the framing and the administration of the law. And he would tell you that that means Mr Morgan and Mr Rockefeller [sic] as well as the poor fellow who cannot pay his rent.”

And yet in 2026, Trump has taken to saying that those Americans calling for the government to maintain the rule of law to make sure the economic playing field is level, rather than working for corporations and the wealthy, are “communists.”

So he is looking to put a thumb on the scale of the midterm elections as he did in the FIFA match and the economy. Trump is demanding that Congress pass the so-called SAVE America Act, a massive voter suppression bill. Yesterday House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told the Fox News Channel that he will try to get Congress to pass the measure by using the budget reconciliation process. Since such a process cannot be filibustered, Republicans might be able to pass it despite Democratic opposition.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that if the Republicans pass the measure, they won’t lose another election for a hundred years.

“The game tonight’s going to be amazing,” Trump said today about tonight’s match. “We’re going to have a full team and Belgium is going to have a full team. And you know what? If they beat us, then they can be really proud. The other way, if they beat us, we’ll say it was— I say it was rigged just like the election was rigged in 2020.”

Tonight, Belgium defeated the USA 4–1 in the World Cup match played in Seattle.

Benito Mussolini destroyed democracy in Italy. He dismantled Italy’s democratic institutions, outlawed opposition parties, eliminated free elections, censored the press, and created a one-party fascist dictatorship.

Argentine military junta carried out a campaign of illegal arrests, torture, and forced disappearances against suspected political opponents and many civilians who had broken no law.

The administration’s report criticizing the National Museum of American History echoes themes of President Trump’s push to reshape the American story.