To understand why President Donald Trump is shutting down one of America’s premier cultural institutions — and why he’s urging what would be an illegal takeover of the basic machinery of democracy in places where his party doesn’t win — one has to turn back the clock four years.
At this time in 2021, Joe Biden was president, Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago home and was very much a pariah in much of polite society after he fomented a riot at the U.S. Capitol in a last-ditch attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. Staring down what would become four years of political exile in Florida, Trump spent much of that time stewing over not just his defeat at the hands of Biden but a laundry list of slights accumulated over the course of his first four years in the White House — and plotting revenge.
