Unhappy Anniversary: One Year Since Trump’s Brutish Assault on History
On March 27, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order provided a template for egregious assaults by the White House on the humanities, arts, higher education generally, and particularly on history. Trump has declared war on history itself, on the freedom of historians to help Americans to learn from our past. For every American who cares about the power of historical understanding to face and potentially heal divisions, about honesty in our memorials, or a host of other matters, March 27 represents the opening attack in what is already a long war with no discernible end.
The order accuses today’s historians of abandoning “objective facts,” of promoting a “divisive race-centered ideology,” and of resisting America’s “unparalleled legacy … of advancing human happiness.” Whether fifth graders, high schoolers, or educated adult readers, most Americans know that the executive order’s claims about the “sanity” of the historical professions are absurd. To write and teach about difference and conflict is not “divisive”; it is no more possible to heal our nation’s divisions without understanding them than it would be possible to cure an illness without revealing one’s medical history to a physician. But despite their rhetoric, Trump and his minions are less interested in healing and unity than in propaganda and indoctrination.
Recently, at a closed White House event conveniently bereft of professional historians, one of the soldiers in Trump’s hijacking of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence described the administration’s approach as “a matter of history, not politics.” We agree with those principles, so let’s get the history right. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, our continued independence requires that we understand what has happened since 1776 (and before) and why.
We might start with institutions whose missions and integrity are embodied in legislation passed by Congress: the Smithsonian Institution, the National Park Service, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, or NEH. These agencies have enjoyed widespread nonpartisan reputations among broad swaths of the American public, and even internationally. Historians, as well as the publics they serve, often disagree on interpretation; that is what we do. But we agree on standards and the imperative of unflinching honesty.
The Trump administration has tarred the experienced professionals at these agencies with its all-purpose epithet “woke.” These historians are not, however, spreading “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” To require the Smithsonian, for example, to consult with a White House devoted to the dissemination of “alternative facts” is tantamount to Thomas Jefferson being ordered to consult with King George III of Great Britain on how to craft the Declaration of Independence.
At the NEH, the administration’s attack dogs, lacking a single qualification relating to the agency’s mission, resorted to using an artificial intelligence program to root out “DEI” because, according to their own sworn depositions, they had no clue what ideas the March 27 executive order actually proscribed.
As historians, we invite all Americans to join in defending the work of our colleagues in federal agencies entrusted with understanding and disseminating the nation’s past honestly and transparently.
As a profession and as citizens, historians must fight with our meager but nevertheless potent weapons. Ours is a beautiful and ancient craft, essential for any society’s self-understanding. Equipped with modern methods and sources, we adhere to time-tested ethical standards that no authoritarian should be allowed to profane. We have our immoral scoundrels and some inscrutable writers, but they are vastly outnumbered by trained professionals obsessed by sacred strictures of practice. Our gospels are research, evidence, clarity of expression, interpretive originality, and literary beauty. We are storytellers armed with facts; we sometimes fly like birds, but we always land on countless perches of reality. Among the most important perches are the exhibitions at our “national” sites of memory.
Democracy and prosperity require free inquiry. The barbarians at our nation’s gates fear the open, curious minds inspired in universities and in public schools, as well as museums and parks. If the United States survives another century or so, how might these supposed custodians of the public trust, driven by power, greed, and the urge to destroy liberalism, be portrayed by our successors?
Will they be celebrated in perplexing, pathetic gardens of heroes (monuments to their insecurity) and gigantic arches overshadowing monuments to soldiers who gave their lives for national survival? Will they be remembered in a single name chiseled all over government buildings? Or will they leave a path of ruins until finally they are stopped by democratic politics? Will the Smithsonian museums be relics of a failed American experiment, the new world’s Roman Forum, pored over by the curious and the prurient, or the revived jewels of a new twenty-second-century democracy? Will national historic parks tell troubled truths about our past as well as inspire awe?
If left to Trumpist architects seeking to control American history, our fate could end up fulfilling the vision of Trump’s “1776 Commission” curriculum, which exhorts teachers to abandon critical thinking and considers patriotic education to be a matter of: “Learn it, wonder at it, love it, and teach so your students will too.”
The executive order seeks to compel an Orwellian version of “truth and sanity,” in which “Saving our Smithsonian” requires museums to “remove improper ideology” or lose their federal “appropriations.” In America we argue about ideology, as well as what is ideology itself.
When lies by smug propagandists become official truths, democratic culture dies. Trumpists seek to roll back what they loathe about the Enlightenment itself—the free mind seeking old and new truths through reason and under rule of law. Recall Immanuel Kant’s simple answer to “What is Enlightenment?” in 1784: “Dare to know!” he proclaimed. We need heightened forms of daring to save the practice of history in American public culture.