Donald Trump has a problem with the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. For over 150 years, its French Second Empire granite has stood elegantly next to the White House. I’ve been in that building numerous times. To me and many others, it’s an architectural marvel.
But Trump looks at that historic stone and sees a flaw. He wants it painted white, which is his wish for everything else to make America great again.
At a projected taxpayer cost of more than $7.5 million, Trump is attempting to literally whitewash one of the preeminent buildings in our nation’s capital. Architects and preservationists warn that painting granite is a death sentence for the stone since it traps moisture, accelerates decay, and locks taxpayers into an endless cycle of repainting. A lawsuit has already been filed citing “irreparable harm.”
But this paint job is more than just something that’s on the surface. It’s emblematic and metaphoric of something much deeper — Trump’s continued pattern of whitewashing America.
In March of last year, Trump signed an executive order chillingly titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” targeting the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of African American History and Culture for promoting what he called “divisive race-centered ideology.”
The administration’s official position is that the documented history of Black Americans, slavery, segregation, the long struggle for civil rights, is an “ideology” that needs correction. Yes, correction by a man with a history littered with racism.
And that man makes no attempt to hide his bigotry. Trump has characterized the Smithsonian's portrayal of slavery and the "downtrodden" as overly negative and "horrible." In August 2025, he criticized the Institution for being "OUT OF CONTROL," claiming it focuses too much on "how bad Slavery was."
Trump thinks that our nation’s history should be all about white success — like the fabricated success he had as a spoiled, billionaire who thinks racists are “very fine people.”
Under the order, eight Washington-based Smithsonian museums were placed under White House review, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of American History, and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Their offense? Telling the truth about the country.
The purge has already produced results. The Smithsonian’s diversity office was shuttered. Historical material disappeared from government websites. The Air Force briefly removed educational content about the Tuskegee Airmen. They are the men who flew combat missions for a country that still segregated them. Apparently even that history was considered too “divisive” to teach.
The symbolism kept coming. The National Park Service removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from its list of free-admission days for 2026 while adding Flag Day, which happens to coincide with Trump’s birthday.
It’s utterly disgusting what Trump has been doing to purge Black history from U.S. history. But Trump has another white supremacist accomplice helping to fulfill his “whites only” dram.
And that is the U.S. Supreme Court, which added to its own monochromic wish in a 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC. That decision overturned decades of precedent allowing universities to consider race in admissions.
The conservative and supremacist supermajority declared that “colorblindness” required the country to make believe that centuries of racial inequity no longer mattered.
It was appalling, catastrophic and a harbinger.
The results were immediate and entirely predictable. Princeton’s Black student enrollment fell to levels not seen since the 1960s. Harvard’s Black freshman enrollment dropped from 18 percent to 14 percent in a single year. At UNC, Black enrollment fell from 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent.
Now, after the court dispensed with Blacks in colleges, they’re coming for them at the ballot box..
Late last month, the Court issued its 6-3 opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, dramatically weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. If we thought the college admissions ruling was bad, things just got so much worse.
In a provocative and spot-on recent column, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie summed up the consequence of the Court’s actions in a visceral way. He argues that Roberts' voting rights rulings, specifically regarding Louisiana v. Callais, substitute the "blunt instrument of the white robe and hood" with the "polite, clinical language of judicial neutrality".
The KKK-wanna-be Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion rewrote the legal framework courts have used for four decades to evaluate racial vote dilution claims, making it significantly harder for voters of color to prevail.
Justice Elena Kagan warned bluntly in dissent that the ruling leaves Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” She was right.
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry announced the day after the ruling that he was suspending the state’s May 16 primary so lawmakers could redraw congressional maps, despite mail ballots already having been sent to overseas and early voters.
Then the Court went nuclear, burning the proverbial wooden cross. The conservative majority bypassed its own standard waiting period and finalized the ruling just days after issuing it.
Now, red states are clamoring to undo majority-Black legislative districts.
The fallout is barbaric, because it will reshape congressional representation nationwide before the 2026 midterms. If these redistricting plans pass, it will disenfranchise Black voters to a degree not seen since 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.
This country is being white washed to an almost unprecedented degree.
The racism that exists subtly behind the EEOB paint job, and more overtly with the Smithsonian purge, the affirmative action ban, and the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is fundamentally the same. The layered, multiracial diversity of America is being treated as a scourge that needs to be erased and painted over.
For six decades, the Voting Rights Act was the backbone of federal protection against racial discrimination in elections. The Court has now painted over that.
And while the country is being symbolically whitewashed, its history sanitized, its campuses resegregated, its districts redrawn, a literal coat of white paint might be rolled across the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
That symmetry is not accidental And the consequences are extraordinarily damaging.