Legacies That Can't Be Denied

The legacies that can’t be denied Regarding the March 16 article “Under Trump, the NIH freezes out its most prominent alumnus”: President Donald Trump directed that Anthony S. Fauci’s image be removed from an National Institutes of Health mural. He pulled the security detail for the doctor. Perhaps he’ll even declare Fauci’s 2008 Presidential Medal of Freedom null and void. But Trump can’t erase Fauci’s life’s work on diseases such as HIV/AIDS and Ebola, etc. And the president for sure can’t ever erase the lives Fauci saved thanks to the medical treatments he helped develop through his research and the scientists he mentored. Then there’s the insanity and offensiveness of burying references to Colin Powell on a government website because of Trump’s order that anything that might be termed “DEI” get scrubbed. Powell won the Soldier’s Medal for Bravery in Vietnam, and served as national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state. What’s next? Erasure of Rosa Parks’s existence? Attempts to remove or reuse the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial and the space intended for the future Women’s Suffrage Monument because they’re all on government grounds? Expelling the statue of Mary McLeod Bethune from the Capitol? Removing Ira Hayes from the Marine Corps War Memorial? Trump can denigrate anyone he wants. But no one can ever remove what’s inviolable. Mindyl Siegman Gaynor, Washington