Politics
Trump Rewriting US History? Historians Alarmed Ahead of 250th Anniversary
Trump rewriting US history-
One may argue that Donald Trump approaches history in a lighthearted, Sam Cooke-esque manner.
Similar to the renowned “king of soul” in his 1960 hit song Wonderful World, the US president has acknowledged that, despite being surrounded by experts on the subject, he knows very nothing about historical events or historical individuals.
American historian Douglas Brinkley recently recalled a conversation at Mar-a-Lago shortly after Trump’s 2016 election victory. Brinkley said he was shocked to learn that Trump, who has pondered having his name carved on Mount Rushmore alongside the country’s most renowned presidents, had never read a book about Abraham Lincoln.
During a webcast hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Brinkley stated, “He was considering what he would do for his inaugural address, and he said he knew nothing about past history.”
It surprised me because politicians even fabricate books when they speak. They act as though they read a great deal. He informed me that he was a visual man and kind of laughed it off. That translated to mean that John F. Kennedy was the first person to truly understand history.
But as Trump tries to seize control of the US’s history in the lead-up to next year’s monumental celebration of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence, often known as the semiquincentennial, ignorance seems to be no obstacle.
The president has begun to produce his own authorized version of US history under an executive order issued in January. Historians are concerned that this will follow the tried-and-true authoritarian strategy of removing embarrassing and inconvenient chapters that do not fit his idea of American greatness.
Jonathan Alter, a historian and biographer of several US presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter, said, “He is essentially a restorationist and has never been a student of history.” A “restorationist” is a “political figure who operates on the politics of nostalgia,” according to Alter.
He doesn’t know anything about political or economic history. Additionally, he wants to utilize the 250 to honor him, Alter continued. “He will definitely try to hijack that event next year, but we don’t yet know exactly how he will do it.”
In his order, Trump initially named himself chair of a White House taskforce 250 and promised “other actions to honor the history of our great nation” as well as a “grand celebration” to commemorate the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026.
One of those began last month when the White House 250 website launched the first of a series of brief videos titled “The Story of America.” The videos were created in collaboration with Hillsdale College, a Michigan-based conservative Christian university.
In the first video, Larry Arnn, the president of the college and a former research director for Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill’s official biographer, compared Lincoln to Trump, pointing to the latter’s catchphrase, “Make America Great Again.”
Arnn, who did not reply to the Guardian’s request for an interview, stated, “He has a famous slogan that I will not repeat here, but everybody knows what it is, and it ends with the word again.” “He wants to repeat an action that has already been taken. Additionally, it puts him in the vicinity of Abraham Lincoln’s political life.
The founding fathers defended the declaration by claiming that King George III “violated his rightful powers by invading the authority of the legislature, which indicates separation of powers would be right, and that he has interfered with representation, our ability to elect our government, which means consent of the governed … and … interfered with the judicial branch,” according to Arnn, who describes the text of the independence document. This parallel may have been unintentional.
The recordings are being released weeks after Trump demanded in another executive order that the way the nation’s history is portrayed in national parks and federally supported museums like the Smithsonian be drastically changed.
The National Endowment for the Humanities is providing partial funding for life-size sculptures of 250 significant historical personalities as part of the administration’s plans for a national garden of American heroes.
However, with detractors accusing the president of acting like a despot, usurping powers that belong to Congress, and disobeying court rulings, Arnn’s story unintentionally highlights the political dangers that Trump faces when he attempts to align himself with America’s revolutionary founders.
According to US history professor Johann Neem of Western Washington University, Trump’s issue is that the revolution was a revolt “against tyranny and arbitrary power,” which is what he is currently attempting to exercise.
He declared, “There is no connection between the true political significance of the revolution and what Trump is doing to our constitution.” Someone like Donald Trump, who would be lawless and have arbitrary authority that isn’t constrained by the rule of law, is what the founders feared most, as anyone who teaches about the American Revolution knows.
Historians claimed that Trump’s attempt to capture the historical narrative is a part of a larger culture war that is partly driven by left-wing discourses about race’s centrality in the national narrative. The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which critically examines some of the most admired leaders of the American Revolution and their opinions on slavery, served as an example of those viewpoints.
At a White House history event in 2020, Trump responded splenetic to the Pulitzer-winning study, calling it “totally discredited” and representative of a left-wing critique that “defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies.”
“To teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom, this project rewrites American history,” he said at the ceremony.
In response, he ordered a report in 1776 that was published in the latter days of his first term. The report outlined plans for a “patriotic education” that would contradict courses on topics like as critical race theory and structural racism. The report was criticized for misrepresenting the nation’s racist past, misrepresenting some of the founding fathers of the revolution who owned slaves, and stealing Martin Luther King words.
Trump’s viewpoint, according to Neem, is a “hyper-nationalist overreaction” to what he described as “a post-American approach” taken by some left-leaning historians who saw racism as so fundamental to the nation’s philosophy that it left common people feeling there was little to celebrate. He cautioned that the outcome might be a “saccharine” and oversimplified telling of America’s frequently complicated history, which would be “an abuse of history” and be used as a “autocratic playbook.”
Neem stated, “He is speaking for a group of intellectuals and activists who genuinely believe progressives have stolen their country and corrupted American culture.” They view historians and other professionals as a sort of impurity, and the critical turn in American history is only one aspect of a bigger issue.
Some historians are retaliating against Trump for invading their field.
Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson, who specializes in the United States throughout the 19th century, is creating a series of 90-second videos titled Journey to American Democracy that she hopes will someday be shown in classrooms.
Given that other historians were attempting to project “grassroots history” to a larger online audience, she projected that Trump’s attempts to control history through Taskforce 250 would ultimately fail.
Cox Richardson stated, “We are examining the various ways in which our constantly multicultural society built a nation, and that is a story of extraordinary triumph, but also of missteps and tragedy.” One of the things you see with the advent of a strongman is the attempt to obliterate genuine history, and the belief that we had a flawless past that needs to be recovered is an ideology in service of an authoritarian, strongman.
However, if you look around the United States right now, you can see that the president’s power to influence culture is eroding. Other people will start to reply, “Well, no, not really,” the more he discusses it being the sanitized product of a few ideologically pure white leaders in the past.