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”?
