The White House has crowned high school winners of President Donald Trump’s propaganda-driven civics competition.

On Tuesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon posted a photo of Trump with the Presidential 1776 Award winner, Miriam Washut of Wyoming, and runners-up after an event that epitomized the president’s brazenly corrupt and fundamentally bigoted agenda.

Corrupt, in this case, because this event of the president’s creation aired on CBS, the television network his administration has helped guide into the hands of the Trump-aligned Ellison family. So this was the White House yet again providing content for Paramount Skydance, CBS’ parent company.

And bigoted because this competition was conceived after the MAGA movement’s racist tantrums over “The 1619 Project,” an award-winning initiative from The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones that documents slavery’s role in America’s founding.

As CNN explained in a recent report:

The idea for the 1776 Award dates to Trump’s first term, when he created an education-focused panel called the 1776 commission as an answer to The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which he dismissed as “toxic propaganda.” In his second term, Trump reestablished both the commission and the contest as he seeks to put an end to what he has called “radical indoctrination” in schools across the country.

CNN’s report quoted participants who said they were eager to win scholarship money but expressed mixed feelings about the competition’s ability to achieve Trump’s goal of promoting “patriotism” and, in some cases, overt criticism of his administration.

To be clear: In a vacuum, such a competition is a perfectly fine idea. But Americans are not living in a vacuum.

They are living under one of the most brazenly anti-intellectual regimes — if not the most — in the nation’s history, a history this administration has routinely tried to whitewash. And this competition seemingly was devised to give the appearance that Trump and his allies value intellect and historical accuracy — despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

The president of the United States is an ignorant, self-described “genius” who has declared war on historical accuracy and whose academic records have conveniently been withheld from the public for years.

And the education secretary he appointed is a gaffe-prone former professional wrestling executive with no experience leading an education agency.

It’s hard to imagine people less qualified to promote a competition celebrating history and Americans’ understanding of it.

In this way, this event was oxymoronic at its core. And that American students were effectively used as props underscores how utterly shameless the administration can be.

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