On Thursday, my daughter, who’s a high school senior, won first place for the best paper in the National History Day competition for all of New York City. The title of her paper is “Drop Dead University: The Fight for Free Education at the City University of New York.” She worked hard on it, dug deep into the municipal archives about the 1975 Fiscal Crisis and the decision to end free tuition at CUNY, read widely in the secondary literature, and, though I’m obviously not objective, did a good job. Now she goes on to the New York State competition, which will be at the end of April.

Aside from proud-parent bragging, I’m posting about this tonight because I just read in the New York Times that one of the targets of Trump’s DOGE cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities last year was…National History Day. Curious about this—the grant is just a half-million dollars, and there are tons of high school students who participate in the competition—I watched the very long deposition of the former acting head of the NEH, which is being sued by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Languages Association, and the American Historical Association.

Michael McDonald, the former acting head of the NEH, is a longtime conservative activist/lawyer. He came to Washington in the early 1980s to fight for all sorts of right-wing causes, though he doesn’t seem to remember exactly what they were, and as the acting head of the NEH, he was able to keep fighting for them.

At the 5:09:42 mark in the video, McDonald starts getting questioned about the decision to cut funding for National History Day. It’s a chilling exchange. McDonald is asked by the academic organizations’ lawyer to read a series of email exchanges between him and Justin Fox, who was one of the two young whatever-they-were that were leading the cuts at DOGE.

As he reads them over, it becomes clear that Fox wanted to cut the National History Day program entirely. McDonald wasn’t a fan of the program because he thought it leaned “left,” but he also thought that, with a little bit of “leeway” from DOGE, he might be able to work with the National History Day programmers to bring the program into “alignment” with Trump’s viewpoint. But Fox wasn’t so inclined, so the program got nixed. Once McDonald realizes what he’s saying in the deposition—that he allowed DOGE to make the decision rather than making it himself—he tries to backpedal, but the damage is done.

So these are the kinds of people who are making the decisions about what is remembered and what is forgotten. A tired, aging nincompoop at the National Endowment of the Humanities and a former employee of Nexus Capital Management.

Meanwhile, my daughter, and all those other high school students, are burying themselves in the archive, trying to reconstruct what happened 50 years ago, when the American right in DC and the neoliberal center in NYC declared war on public higher education.

“Forgetting,” Renan said in 1882, “I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” Trump, DOGE, and all the rest are trying to make it so. But as Renan went on to say, that “is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality.” There’s a reason why Trump and DOGE are fighting history. There’s a reason why history is fighting Trump and DOGE.