Chartbook 379 American Victory Day

Even after one hundred days it is hard to keep up with the pace of Trump’s outrages. The escalatory spiral remains hard to anticipate.

Last week I did my regular op-ed for the FT on the problem of commemorating the 80th anniversary of World War II as partners of Trump’s administration.

What I had in mind was:

(1) Trump’s revisionism on America’s global role;

(2) his well-known fondness for military parades combined with his difficulties in commemorating America’s fallen soldiers;

(3) Trump’s general contempt for narrative coherence and conventional weighting of historical significance: his comparisons of himself to Lincoln and the Mar-a-Lago push to carve Trump’s face into the ensemble on Mount Rushmore;

(4) the extraordinary flexion in the space of public memory imposed at this moment by Israel’s “history politics” and its war on Gaza.

What defines the space of public memory is never simple. It is certainly not history “as such”, no such thing exists. Commemoration is preeminently an exercise of selectivity and power. In the current moment, the shielding of Israel’s relentless campaign against the Palestinian people behind political and legal defenses anchored in memory of the Holocaust, requires new levels of double-think. To ensure the necessary level of torsion, Trump has recently removed key Biden appointees from the The United States Holocaust Memorial Council insisting, contrary to all evidence, that this was necessary to ensure that the Memorial was overseen by true friends of Israel. Trump’s replacement picks include Sid Rosenberg who, as the Washington Post reports, in “a speech at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in November, … called Democrats “a bunch of degenerates … Jew-haters and lowlifes, every one of ’em.”” As Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) remarked: “This is a clear political strike at an institution that has worked assiduously to rise above the muck of partisan politics to try to address the greatest genocidal trauma of the 20th century. Donald Trump wants to turn the council into a partisan club and a weapon against anyone who does not toe the Netanyahu line in Israeli politics.”

Trump had already ruffled feathers on this 80th anniversary by reminding the world in January that the Soviet Union had been important in “helping” the United States in victory over Nazi Germany. I presume this was actually an effort on Trump’s part to recognize the role played by the Red Army. It didn’t go down well with patriotic Russian commentators.

What I did not imagine, as we were putting the final edits on the FT piece, was that Trump himself had World War II on his mind, or that he would be upping the ante on Truth Social, declaring May 8th as Victory Day.

Just to fact check Trump’s bombast, as a quick reminder of the military and civilian casualty toll in World War II, see below. Blue is military. Black is civilian. The US ranks 18th in overall casualties almost entirely military.

Only in the Pacific, the theatre of war which Trump chooses to slight, did the US carry the main burden of Allied casualties.

In the glorious fifteenth week of the President’s second term Trump’s renaming was just one of many “wins”.

In the FT piece, I asked whether it is possible to commemorate World War II with Trump’s America. I doubted whether his administration was capable of mustering the necessary solemnity or seriousness. I did not imagine that he would give us his answer so soon or so directly.

---

I love writing Chartbook. I am delighted that it goes out for free to 150,000 readers around the world. What supports this writing are the generous donations of active subscribers. Click the button below to join the supporters’ club.