Last week, Donald Trump’s rolling
assault on the physical landscape of the capital set its sights on yet another
historical landmark. The fountain in the World War II memorial, Trump
declared, looked “in pretty bad shape on the bottom,” in need of a makeover
“duplicating” that for the nearby Reflecting Pool, though “maybe with a
slightly different color … a lighter blue.”
But as we head toward Trump-led
celebrations of our country’s semiquincentennial featuring a UFC cage fight in
a 5,000-person arena thrown up on the White House lawn, we need to recognize that
his onslaught against our history has also extended far beyond the physical.
Not long ago, two watchdog groups
sued the Trump administration over the White House’s internal guidance that
email exchanges between executive branch officials could be peremptorily
deleted, escaping preservation for the historical record. A blatant violation
of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the memo leaned on a Justice Department move declaring this act itself unconstitutional. While this
time, a
court then ruled in favor of the watchdogs, this administration’s efforts
to vanish its own public record advance its sweeping campaign to expunge
realities as well as richness from American history, to reduce it to tales of
untethered “heroes” that will drain its democratic lifeblood.
In April, the Organization of
American Historians convened its annual conference in Philadelphia. New
York Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler described the tone of this gathering of American
historians as “anxious.” This attendee felt a more widespread emotional
undercurrent: anger. That feeling has been stirred far more by the Trump
administration’s designs on American history than by other worries reported by
Schuessler, including historians’ “declining authority” as growing numbers of
Americans take up history telling via TikTok, YouTube, and other media that are
available to everyone.
I, along with many other
historians, am far less bothered by TikTok history than by the sheer scope and
brazenness of this top-down White House–led assault on history.
Arguably the popularization of
history telling beyond professional circles represents a further front in the
democratization that the field of American history has undergone over the last
half-century. Especially from the mid-twentieth century, historians have
striven to make the telling of American history more inclusive and democratic.
By the 1980s, when I entered graduate school, all my instructors agreed that
history was made more by ordinary Americans than by “great men,” and many
quests were well underway to broaden our sense of whose pasts counted in
American history. Tapping new sources and employing new methodologies,
historians brought out the voices and experiences of those whom earlier
traditions of history writing had marginalized or ignored: immigrants, women, Indigenous
peoples, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, workers, religious minorities, and
people with disabilities, thereby multiplying the publics with recognizable
stakes in the American past.
Historians also set their sights on
the historical dynamics of attendant inequalities and injustices such groups
had faced—the discrimination, oppression, and violence that had relegated them
to history’s shadows, along with the everyday struggles, activism, and
movements through which they persisted and resisted.
That’s precisely the kind of
bottom-up American history that the Trump administration is seeking to squelch.
Its stated intentions, announced via a March 2025 executive order, began with an utter fantasy: that
“Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to replace
objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than
truth.” But the administration’s sole corrective offered for judging historical
“truth” has nothing to do with the evidence, arguments, or evenhandedness on
which historians rely. Instead, it adjudicates the “truth” of American history
by whether it conforms to a formulaic storyline deemed “patriotic”—that is, if
it demonstrates “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty,
individual rights, and human happiness.”
Ironically and sadly, this strictly
standardized messaging about American history imposed from the top, alongside the administration’s far-ranging quest to expunge any divergences from it, stands in stark contrast to the historical theme of “advancing liberty” it
claims to favor.
Take for example how the
administration’s imperious designs pair “patriotic” American history with much
talk about “greatness” and “heroes,” such as in Trump’s proposed “National
Garden of American Heroes.” That will feature lifesize statues of people “embodying
the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage
and confidence, loyalty and love.”
Reducing the American past to a
grab bag of individual achievers, it drops away historical power structures and
social dynamics of inequality, tacitly normalizing how few of the 244
“heroes” now
reported under consideration were not white men, but women (just
52), African Americans (just 34), or Latino or Hispanic people (just seven at best,
counting three Spanish colonials). The dogmas about the past conveyed here are
dubious if crystal-clear: that American history has moved forward through the
heroic actions of individuals, the vast majority of them white and male. What’s
most true about this reassertion of “great man” history is that it is
politically expedient, especially for an administration so deeply affiliated
with present-day America’s growing concentrations of wealth and power as well
as a conservative “war on wokeness.”
The Trump White House likewise has
also elevated two private purveyors of this heroic and avowedly conservative
history into the nation’s official history teachers for this country’s 250th
birthday. It contracted with PragerU, founded in 2009 by a conservative
talk-show host, to create an online exhibit featuring AI-crafted videos of our
“Founders.” And it hired Hillsdale College, a small but lavishly endowed
conservative evangelical college in Michigan, to produce an 18-episode Story
of America series, the vast majority on great leaders or battles, for the
White House’s 250th webpage. Augmenting the Trump administration’s effort to
force-feed its purportedly “patriotic” history to the American public is a
slew of executive orders, as well as commands and reorientations of funding
within the Department of Education, that target what’s supposed to be taught in
the nation’s classrooms.
In an effort that runs parallel to these 250th
plans and initiatives, the second Trump administration has pulled out all the
stops to censor history within its reach that doesn’t conform to its pinched
standards for the “patriotic” and “heroic” in the American past. Its sweeping
review of displays across museums, parks, and historic sites under federal
control led to the January removal of slavery exhibits at the President’s House
in Philadelphia, stirring protests and lawsuits that brought a reversal. By mid-February, some 18
other erasures of historical as well as scientific information had
been documented across the National Park Service, with the Smithsonian’s eight
museums and sites across many other agencies, including the rest of the NPS’s
more than 430 separate units, still in the crosshairs.
Part and parcel of the
administration’s resolve to foist its own canned versions of American history
upon us is its disdain for preserving or releasing historical records that may
tell other tales. Since January 2025, the National Archives and Records
Administration, the main caretaker of our government’s historical records, has
suffered from chair-shuffling at its helm, as well as a loss of nearly 18
percent of its staff. The volume of Freedom of Information Act requests
processed by federal agencies has dropped by 52 percent, dramatically reducing
access to government records by historians as well as journalists.
Likely the most insidious and
destructive of this administration’s attacks on American history have targeted
the institutions, funding, and laws that support historical practitioners
working outside the conservative circles the White House favors. It sought to
shutter the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, and the National Institute for the
Humanities, all vital sources of support for historical research and practice.
While courts and Congress have reversed many cuts it has attempted, Trump-appointed
leadership has, in the case of the NEH, moved away from peer review for its
grants, instead doling out millions to conservative-aligned institutions and
projects, with $13 million going toward the construction of Trump’s “triumphal arch.”
To those of us who watched and
participated in the democratization of our field of American history over the
past half-century, “patriotic” is hardly the right descriptor for the Trump
administration’s forcible reengineering of the American past, and “anxious” is
an understatement of the anger felt by many across the profession in reaction
to these efforts.
More accurately, by positing the republic’s
perfection from its start, by downplaying its contradictions and subsequent
struggles, Trumpian history cultivates complacency toward the distinctly
undemocratic future to which it appears to aspire. But isn’t it more patriotic
to look hard at the history of our nation’s flaws, also at the multitudinous,
often faltering efforts to make our nation into what it ideally could and
should be, “with liberty and justice for all”?
