By Christine Rosen
Thursday, September 18, 2025
If President Donald Trump’s careers in real estate
development, television, and now politics have taught us anything, it is that
he likes to leave his mark (and his name) on everything he touches. Some of
those marks, like the profusion of gilt ornaments and gold, Trump-branded
coasters in the Oval Office, will almost certainly be removed by future
presidents. Others, like the proposed construction of a White House ballroom or
his plan to build a “Garden of Heroes” featuring statues of great Americans,
are more likely to become permanent parts of the White House and National Mall.
So far, Trump’s most enthusiastic attempts to leave his
mark on history in his second term have come in the form of numerous executive
orders (EOs) that are also unlikely to prove lasting, as they will be reversed
the moment a Democrat is sworn in as president. Yet they are revealing of
Trump’s approach to history and national memory.
Some of the EOs are a form of executive branch
rebranding, such as EO 14172, “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,”
which changed “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America” and, reversing a change
made in 2015 by the Obama administration, changed “Denali” back to “Mount
McKinley.” Others, such as EO 14224, “Designating English as the Official
Language of the United States,” are pure political posturing. The U.S. has
never had an official designated language, and Trump’s declaring one will
matter little.
Other executive orders should be welcomed, even by voters
who are not supporters of Trump. EO 14189, “Celebrating America’s 250th
Birthday,” establishes a task force to celebrate the semiquincentennial of the
Declaration of Independence and brings back two EOs from Trump’s first term
that Biden had rescinded: the National Garden of American Heroes plan, yes, but
also an order “Protecting America’s Monuments from Vandalism.” The latter,
unfortunately, remains necessary, as demonstrated by the extensive damage done
to statues and monuments nationwide by left-wing rioters in the spring and
summer of 2020.
It is EO 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American
History,” issued by Trump at the end of March, that has received the most
attention and generated significant angst among figures on the cultural left,
as it targets the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service. The
opening paragraphs of the EO are statements of fact: “Over the past decade,
Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our
Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven
by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the
remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles
and historical milestones in a negative light.”
Setting aside the odd title given to the EO — history is
neither sane nor insane; it just is — any honest broker in the culture wars of
the last decade cannot fault this summary of events. The New York Times–sponsored
1619 Project, a revisionist history of the United States, was the best-known of
these efforts, but there were many more in museums and textbooks and school
curricula throughout the country. Much of this ideological revisionism has been
done by curators and activists quietly behind the scenes for years, which is
why the public was surprised when they learned that taxpayer-funded
institutions like the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History
and Culture were spending money on educational projects that taught, as
Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute noted, “that values like
‘hard work,’ ‘self-reliance,’ be[ing] polite,’ and timeliness are all a product
of the ‘white dominant culture’” and that “conventional grammar, Christianity,
the notion that ‘intent counts’ in courts of law, and the scientific method and
its emphasis on ‘objective, rational linear thinking’ are all proprietary to
‘white culture.’”
Trump’s plan for the Smithsonian is not without flaws.
Critics of the administration’s efforts to audit the Smithsonian’s practices
are correct to point out that the review panel chosen by Trump lacks anyone
with historical expertise or significant museum experience. The effort is being
spearheaded by Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide who has spoken of her love
of history and her desire to see more positive narratives about America’s past
but who has no scholarly credentials or practical experience in the field.
Trump supporters like to claim that only outsiders uncorrupted by expert
training can effectively revolutionize ideologically captured institutions, but
this is not true in every case, especially when this sensibility ignores the
wisdom of experts who would also like to see public history de-radicalized. It
would have been better had Trump chosen at least one professional historian of
non-radical sensibilities (they do exist!) to help guide the evaluation of the
Smithsonian.
Of course, many professional historians (who are among
academia’s most liberal groups) objected to the EO’s mission in its entirety.
The Organization of American Historians (OAH) claimed that museums and national
parks were now “under assault” and called Trump’s EO “a disturbing attack on
core institutions and the public presentation of history, and indeed on
historians and history itself.” The OAH (which claims 6,000 members) is hardly
a disinterested party to such disputes, but it is also no neutral arbiter of
the past. During the riots sparked by George Floyd’s killing, the OAH released
a statement calling on its members “to deepen our commitments and redouble our
efforts to preserve, interpret, and teach history that helps us all understand
the ongoing centrality of racism in the United States, as well as the massive
efforts to fight for justice — the present uprising included.” As for scholarly
objectivity? “We must bring our historical understanding to bear on
contemporary issues and antiracist movements by speaking truth to power, at our
own institutions and beyond.” That is properly understood as a tone of
activism. Not surprising for an organization that for years has devoted
significant energy to political advocacy, which, of course, flows only in one
direction — to the left.
Trump is uncowed by such scolding. In mid-August, he
posted on Truth Social, “The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the
Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian
is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is,
how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about
Brightness, nothing about the Future.” He went on to argue, “We have the
‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including
in our Museums.”
Hyperbole aside, when he vows to restore public
institutions to their pre-“woke” status, Trump is channeling public opinion —
and the results of the last election. Even the private sector has been
dismantling its diversity, equity, and inclusion branding and infrastructure.
Restoration projects pose their own challenges, however.
History and national memory are not the same thing. History is constantly
revised, reinterpreted, and rewritten as new facts are unearthed and new
theories become fashionable, for better and for worse. Historiographical
battles can be fierce, but the skirmishes tend to be contained largely within
academia.
National memory is shaped by far more than these
historical narratives; it includes popular culture, popular myths, and the
public spaces that a country nurtures and that help shape its collective
identity. Ceremonies, symbols, monuments, stories: these all become part of a
country’s national memory. This is why radicals try to destroy statues of the
Founding Fathers and memorials to the past, or to declare a “new founding” for
the country in 1619 rather than 1776. It is part of a larger effort to destroy
these bonds between past and future generations and thereby seize control of
the national story. Doing so allows them to declare a new vision of society
“unburdened by what has been,” as former Vice President Kamala Harris was so
fond of saying.
The past is always our burden, however, and Trump should
know that better than anyone — he ran and won in 2016 on his past achievements
as a businessman and entertainer and has been dogged ever since by his past
misdeeds, particularly with women. And while national memories are the things
we choose to remember in common, those also change with time. “Make America
Great Again” has always been an explicit appeal to look back in time to a
supposedly simpler, better era of American history, but its strength as a
political slogan is also its weakness as a guide to cultivating national
memory.
The impulse to rebut the extreme politicization of the
past by the ideological left, which sees only colonialism, domination,
extermination of minorities, and oppression in our nation’s story, is
understandable — one might even say necessary. But the Trump administration has
at times oversimplified that story, embracing a nostalgia purveyed on social
media and borrowing heavily from earlier eras’ efforts to shape cultural
memory. The Instagram account of the Department of Homeland Security is replete
with images of 19th-century westward expansion, such as Albert Bierstadt’s Among
the Sierra Nevada, California, echoing the manifest-destiny theme invoked
in Trump’s second inaugural address. The account more recently featured George
Caleb Bingham’s Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap,
with the trollish comment, “Pioneers, not illegals.”
But nostalgia is history’s simplistic, cloying cousin,
and it can pose a trap as well. Nostalgia looks backward in a country that
usually prefers to understand itself as moving forward into a better future
(even if that, too, is often a simplification of reality). And rather than a
message of “Pioneers, not illegals,” Americans generally hold more complicated
views of immigration that shift significantly over time. Encouraging a return
to a past where immigrants were demonized as invaders is not the way; securing
the border through more vigorous enforcement of the law, as Trump has done, is,
and it has calmed Americans’ fears about immigration. A Gallup poll in June
found that 79 percent of Americans found immigration “good for the country,” a
significant change from one year ago.
As historian Michael Kammen argued in Mystic Chords of
Memory, “invocations of the past (as tradition) may occur as a means of
resisting change or of achieving innovations.” The danger isn’t in the
Trump administration’s efforts to restore a less ideological tone to
institutions of history and cultural memory like the Smithsonian. It is that
Americans, weary of presidential pronouncements and endless ideological battles
over the meaning of the past, will simply stop caring about history at all.
Successful restoration projects don’t resemble yet another round of partisan
culture war. They encourage cultural renaissance, a rediscovery of the values and
stories on which our country was founded, honest assessments of how it has both
achieved and failed to live up to those ideals in different eras. With the
250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence nearly upon us, it is an
opportune time for just such a renaissance. Change for the sake of change —
whether revolutionary or reactionary — is anathema to a conservative
sensibility. Trump’s populism is often at war with conservatism, and that
battle will continue to shape national memory in the years to come. History, as
always, will have the last word.
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