Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden was the latest casualty of President Donald Trump's mass firing spree as he attempts to install an army of loyalists in place of longtime public servants.
But the excuse he gave for the dismissal is ridiculous, wrote author George Saunders in a scathing analysis for The New York Times published on Tuesday — and speaks volumes about the culture Trump has built around himself.
Saunders received the Library of Congress' Prize for American Fiction two years prior — and in his recollection, Hayden "struck me then as energetic, engaged and utterly dedicated to the work of the library. One of the things Dr. Hayden and I bonded over was the idea that knowledge is power, that in a democracy, the more we know, the better we are."
The Trump administration initially stated they didn't even know what her position was, but when it gave a reason for why they fired the first female Librarian of Congress, widely regarded as an "American hero," it was not convincing, Saunders wrote.
"The White House, tossing out nonsense from its meager box of repetitive right-wing auto-defenses, claimed on Friday that Dr. Hayden had, 'in the pursuit of D.E.I.,' done 'quite concerning things,'" wrote Saunders. They didn't actually bother to name what those "concerning things were," he said, because "It couldn’t have. Putting aside the basic idiocy of being against that position ('What, you value diversity? You think things should be equitable? And that all should be included?'), members of the administration now use 'D.E.I.' as a sort of omni-pejorative, deliberately (strategically) leaving its exact meaning vague."
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The one concrete claim the White House made is that she put "inappropriate books for children" into the Library of Congress — echoing the years-long right-wing crusade to censor racial and sexual topics from school libraries.
This is complete nonsense, Saunders wrote: "The librarian of Congress doesn’t put books into the library. And presumably, the American people benefit from having access to the widest possible collection of books," even if some of those people don't want all of those books to be read by their children.
The truth is, Saunders concluded, "The firing of Dr. Hayden and the inane dissembling that followed represent a kind of diabolical Opposite Day phenomenon: An exceptional person is stupidly tossed aside, and to come up with an explanation the administration turns to its patented Random False Rationale Generator."
And his response is, "Shame on all of us if we let these ignorant purveyors of cruelty reduce this beautiful thing we’ve built over these hundreds of years to a hollow, braying, anti-version of itself."