Unhappy Anniversary: One Year Since Trump’s Brutish Assault on History

It’s a year to the day since Trump’s executive order on American history. It’s just as idiotic and offensive now as it was then.

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........

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