Alvarez
are the very circumstances in which Trump-style politics has thrived,
moving seamlessly in the taken-for-grantedness of a land- and mind-
scape that is increasingly dominated by digital technologies, and that
has made history itself (and historical memory) more malleable than
ever before. The reactionary Trump style, that is, has proven far more
adept at navigating a political world that has adjusted to the fact that
we are suspended in a hypermediated connection to an eternal present,
in a permanent state of anxious distraction, bombarded by the new, the
spectacular, and the self-affirming.
Moving within the slippery circuitry of such a world, Trump himself
has become immune to the sting of his own history. He never pauses
long enough to let history crush him; he and his administration just
keep piling on more controversies, gaffs, lies, and atrocities. And, for
our part, as we are forced to always be playing catch up, as we struggle
to keep our heads above water in the flooded present, we become in-
creasingly susceptible to forgetting what just passed, let alone holding
anyone accountable for it.
It is no coincidence that the Trump-led right has harnessed
this history-resistant style of politics to launch an all-out assault on
history as we know it. From Trump’s never-ending lies and attacks
on the media to the GOP’s ramped-up war on academia, from white
supremacist rallies defending Confederate monuments to conserva-
tive pundits discounting the role of slavery in the Civil War, there
is, indeed, a war going on over the terrain of remembrance and over
the mechanisms for enforcing history. Whether one considers the
best-selling historical revisionism of Dinesh D’Souza, the weapon-
ized falsehoods broadcast on Fox News, the power of erasure and
censorship held by the titans of Big Tech, or ideologically warped
narratives approved for K–12 history books, the fact that traces of
these and other noxious forces are being sucked up and reproduced