Officials given 21 days to comply with order after Angel Kelley condemns administration for ‘telling half-truths’
Uwa Ede-Osifo at The Guardian:
A US district court judge has ordered the Trump administration to reinstate any history or science materials it removed from the nation’s public monuments, finding that the White House’s actions “set a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization”.
In March 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “restoring truth and sanity to American history”, calling upon the secretary of interior to examine monuments, memorials and statues to see if they had been altered after January 2020 to represent a “false construction of American history”.
2020 was a year marked by national protests for racial justice. The ensuing public reckoning about race and equity spurred the removal of statues commemorating Confederate leaders.
The Trump directive came as the White House waged war on so-called liberal “wokeism,” rolling back Biden-era diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices and policies (in the past, the president has described DEI as divisive and particularly discriminatory against white people).
The Trump administration also sought to purge “corrosive” or “ideological indoctrination” from exhibitions at the nation’s historical and cultural institutions.
The 2025 executive order resulted in the deinstallation of signage and material at these sites, which referenced topics such as slavery, civil rights, Indigenous history and climate change, according to a February lawsuit that a group of conservation organizations filed against the Trump administration.
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Massachusetts district judge Angel Kelley sided with their complaint.
Angel Kelley ruled in National Parks Conservation Association v. Burgum that the Trump Regime’s historical revisionist-laden removals of national park plaques is unlawful and the plaques that were changed to accommodate Executive Order 14253 should be reverted back.
An exhibit examining slavery at the President's House at Independence Mall in Philadelphia was dismantled on Thursday, Jan. 22.
Emily Rose Grassi and David Chang at NBC Philadelphia:
An exhibit examining slavery at the President's House in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia was removed on Thursday.
NBC10 crews were there on Jan. 22 and found that the plaques were removed from their displays at 6th and Market streets in Center City.
Also on Thursday, the city of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit against Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and acting National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron over the removal of the artwork.
"Removing the exhibit is an effort to whitewash American history. History cannot be erased simply because it is uncomfortable. Removing items from the President's House merely changes the landscape, not the historical record," Philadelphia council member Kenyatta Johnson wrote in a statement reacting to the incident.
The removal comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March of 2025 that reads in part, "take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties within the Department’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living."
"The Department of the Interior is implementing Secretary’s Order 3431, which carries out President Donald J Trump’s Executive Order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The President has directed federal agencies to review interpretive materials to ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values. Following completion of the required review, the National Park Service is now taking action to remove or revise interpretive materials in accordance with the Order," a spokesperson with the National Park Service wrote in a statement obtained by NBC10 on Friday.
More history revisionism from the Trump Regime: The National Park Service removed The Dirty Business of Slavery exhibit at the Independence National Historical Park in Philly, as part of the Trump Regime’s war on America History and Black History in particular.
Philadelphia is rightly suing over this monstrous decision in Philadelphia v. Burgum.
See Also:
Daily Kos: Philadelphia fights back against Trump's racism
The Guardian: Philadelphia sues US government for removal of slavery-related exhibit
Philly Voice: Feds to Philly on President's House suit: Focus on city's jobless rate, 'reckless' cashless bail policy instead
The institution's American history museum, natural history museum, African American history museum and American Indian museum are all affect
Sara Boboltz at HuffPost:
Top officials in President Donald Trump’s administration are carrying out a massive review of the Smithsonian Institution’s museum exhibits, curatorial materials and other operations in advance of the country’s 250th anniversary next year.
The review is meant to better align the vast institution — which encompasses 21 museums, 21 libraries and a zoo — with Trump’s views, specifically those he outlined in a March executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
That order explicitly calls for the Smithsonian Institution to be analyzed.
A Tuesday letter addressed to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch outlined the administration’s expectations.
“This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” it said.
The letter bears the signatures of Lindsey Halligan, Vince Haley and Russ Vought, who serve as senior staff secretary, director of the Domestic Policy Council and director of the Office of Management and Budget, respectively.
The officials say their goal “is not to interfere with the day-to-day operations of curators or staff.”
However, they demand a huge array of materials be provided for their review.
[...]
Within 120 days, the Smithsonian is expected to “begin implementing content corrections.”
Officials will target eight museums first, before expanding to “Phase II,” which is not described.
The museums include: the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
The censorship-happy Trump Regime seizes editorial power over Smithsonian’s museum exhibits to “screen” out exhibits that don’t align with Tyrant 47’s history revisionist vision of America whitewashing the unpleasant parts of American history.
Lawmakers say exclusionary provisions risk collapsing a once-bipartisan effort to build the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum.
Jacob Ogles at The Advocate:
Advocates are alarmed by attempts to exclude exhibits on transgender women from the planned Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. Now, the Democratic Women’s Caucus is urging Congress to reverse course, warning that President Donald Trump’s anti-woman policies could jeopardize the entire project.
The Democratic Women’s Caucus sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson arguing that exclusionary provisions could poison a museum that once enjoyed bipartisan support.
“The work to establish the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum has been rooted in the joint conviction that women's history and women’s stories are central to the identity of our nation,” the letter reads. “The eleventh-hour amendment not only wipes out years of hard-fought bipartisan progress but also threatens our support for the bill.”
Caucus chair Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández and steering members Judy Chu and Debbie Dingell led the effort. A total of 146 Democratic lawmakers signed the letter.
House Republicans put in partisan anti-trans provisions to derail the progress of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, and 146 Democratic Congressional members, including Reps. Nikki Budzinski (D-IL), Wesley Bell (D-MO), Sharice Davis (D-KS), Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ), Sara Jacobs (D-CA), and Sarah Elfreth (D-MD), signed on to a letter from the Democratic Women’s Caucus opposing the House GOP’s trans erasure plans.
See Also:
LGBTQ Nation: Smithsonian women’s history museum may be derailed by GOP effort to feature only “biological women”
If the Trump administration’s efforts to revise history are even partly successful, we could see a startling policy shift in the U.S.
Nathalie Baptiste at HuffPost:
For approximately two centuries, Black people in what would later become America were enslaved by white owners. Yet you would never know about this long and horrific era of U.S. history if you read the 85-page document about historical heroes that a MAGA-aligned group put out ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary.
Although the document mentions enslaved people who went on to fight for freedom, like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington, the words “slave” and “slavery” each appear once. Racism is not mentioned at all. Instead, their biographies champion these figures as “patriots” with a “can-do” spirit. (The document is connected to an art contest for students being put on by the group Freedom 250, an alternative to America 250, the congressionally approved body tasked with organizing celebrations for the country’s semiquincentennial.)
The erasure of a significant but dark chapter of history, which comes as America prepares to celebrate not only 250 years of independence but also 161 years since the official end of slavery, may not surprise anyone who has been paying attention to how President Donald Trump has — and hasn’t — addressed Black history since returning to the White House.
Conservatives have long failed to really reckon with America’s racial history, and politicians have often tried to downplay its significance and cover up some of the more appalling parts of the past. But the Trump administration has largely dispensed with the whitewashing and instead has taken to trying to completely rewrite history.
“It’s more than just trying to erase Black history,” said Bryan Stevenson, the co-founder and executive director at the Equal Justice Initiative. “It’s trying to alter American history.”
“The story of slavery is a critically important story to the history of this country. We had a civil war where hundreds of thousands of people were killed. It shaped the constitutional amendments that have been so impactful in the 20th Century,” he said. “And to not be honest about that history just creates a misunderstanding of who we are as a nation.”
On June 19, 1865, the last of the enslaved people in Texas got word that slavery was officially over — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Black communities across the country marked the occasion for more than a hundred years, and Joe Biden declared Juneteenth to be a federal holiday in 2021 in the wake of the racial justice protests that swept the country after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.
But the Trump administration has stalled progress when it comes to honoring Black history, even trying to erase references to it from the country’s public institutions. The president and his allies have never actually said slavery was made up or that racism has never existed, but they don’t have to.
“Instead of catering to the concerted efforts to rewrite American history and adopt left-wing ideology aimed at diminishing American achievement, President Trump is honoring our country’s extraordinary heritage and restoring a sense of national pride,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, told HuffPost in an emailed statement. “The President has put an end to the radical left and the media’s divisive and inaccurate characterization of our nation’s history, which infiltrated our national parks and museums, and is restoring truth and sanity.”
Two months after returning to the White House, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History,” which ordered federal institutions to deemphasize slavery and racism when talking about American history.
“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,” the order says. “Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.”
The executive order specifically targets the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum complex that is home to many museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Trump said in the order that the Smithsonian has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
Later that year, he took to social media to complain about how the Smithsonian only talks about how bad slavery is.
“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 said in an August 2025 Truth Social post.
Trump said in his social media post that he was ordering a review of the Smithsonian museums, which includes the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. The museum, which opened in 2016, tells a multifaceted story of Black history and the countless contributions to American culture. But it also covers a comprehensive history of slavery in the U.S.
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The federal government has also attempted to remove Black history from public view by taking down exhibits in our national parks, and by using rhetoric that routinely downplays and scoffs at the reality of the nation’s historic horrors.
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If the Trump administration’s efforts to revise history are even partly successful, we could see a policy shift in the U.S., historians and other experts told HuffPost. Part of writing laws is understanding the historical context of why we need certain legislation in the first place — so if the last 200 years are reframed in a MAGA-friendly light, certain rights could start to go by the wayside.
[...]
“You’re not going to be able to actually understand many of the things that come post-1865,” Weicksel said. “You’re not going to understand why there was such unrest in the Reconstruction Era. You’re not going to understand why there was an effort to create the Ku Klux Klan. You’re not going to understand the need for a civil rights movement.”
Trump has repeatedly decried affirmative action in college admissions, a landmark civil rights legislation designed to make progress on racial equality, saying it was an effort to harm white people.
“White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college,” he told The New York Times in January. “So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.”
The Trump administration has launched a war on colleges, particularly the Ivy Leagues, claiming elite institutions are admitting Black students over white ones simply because of their race. The administration has attempted to get schools to fall in line by threatening to pull federal funding unless they comply with orders to turn over student demographic data, alter their academic programming to align with Trump’s policy goals, and prioritize admitting white and conservative students.
Trump has also been actively pushing back on a Biden administration project to take down monuments and rename military bases that were named after Confederate soldiers.
After the South lost the Civil War and all the enslaved people were freed, former Confederates and enslavers embarked on an effort to romanticize the pre-emancipation South. It led to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, an ahistorical myth that claimed that slavery was not the main purpose of the Civil War.
[...]
Trump promised to restore the Confederate names to military bases that had been renamed in late 2020 after Congress passed a law banning military bases from being named after insurrectionists. To avoid breaking that law, the Trump administration restored the old Confederate names by finding soldiers and service members with the same last name.
The USA has never had a real reckoning with its dark and racist history, especially towards African-Americans.
The Trump Regime’s policies are making the issue worse.
The American Women’s History Museum must remove trans people from its exhibits and programming, or lose its federal funding, Trump says.
S. Baum at Erin In The Morning:
“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,” reads President Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order.
He then declared that the accomplishments of trans people, and trans women in particular, must be removed from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum because they constitute an “improper ideology.”
The order condemns a planned exhibit at the Museum that would feature trans athletes. Now, Vice President J.D. Vance, alongside members of the presidential cabinet and staff, will lead the way in a sweeping overhaul of Museum exhibits, programming and leadership by blocking funding unless the Museum promises it will “not recognize men as women in any respect.” The language is a thinly veiled directive to remove trans women from the museum entirely.
Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement that the order was nothing less than “fascism” at work.
“Queer history is American history,” she said. “But instead of focusing on issues that are critical to the American people, the Trump Administration is hellbent on quashing any artistic expression or history that doesn’t fit their definition of ‘American.’ This is what fascism looks like.”
Trump also threatened to withdraw federal funding from any museum, monument or park that he determines has “ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”
Earlier this year, protests erupted in New York City at the Stonewall National Monument, which falls under the National Parks Service, because it removed the word “transgender” from its webpage at the behest of Trump’s initial anti-trans executive order. It is unclear how this new order could impact Stonewall’s future as an institution, whose very premise is that of fighting for the rights of the LGBTQ community (or, as the website currently reads, the “LGB” community).
In a published statement, Alan Spears—a senior director at the National Parks Conservation Association, which is an independent advocacy group—denounced the measures as harmful and ahistorical.
“Truthful and factual accounting of history should not change, regardless of which political party is in power,” Spears said. “The president’s executive order could jeopardize the Park Service’s mission to protect and interpret American history.”
The March 27 executive order also called for a review of national monuments that have been modified or taken down since January 1, 2020, for potential reinstallation. The George Floyd uprising of that year saw the removal and destruction of many monuments that glorified historically racist and pro-slavery figures.
The Trump Misadministration demands that American Women’s History Museum erase trans people or lose federal funding on the basis of “improper ideology” (meaning that it is an ideology opposed to Tyrant 47’s vision).
This is yet another piece in 47’s war on trans people and truthful American history involving trans Americans.
The directive is "restoring truth and sanity to American history," the White House said.
Lydia O'Connor at HuffPost:
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday aimed at undoing many of the changes made during the racial reckoning movement, including the restoration of monuments, and the removal of so-called “anti-American ideology” from national museums and other federal properties.
The White House said the order was part of “restoring truth and sanity to American history by revitalizing key cultural institutions and reversing the spread of divisive ideology.”
The executive order calls for the removal of “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo,” pointing to exhibits that address the United States’ history of racism and celebrate the transgender rights movement.
“The prior administration pushed a divisive ideology that reconstrued America’s promotion of liberty as fundamentally flawed, infecting revered institutions like the Smithsonian and national parks with false narratives,” the order reads.
Trump’s directive also calls on the Secretary of the Interior to restore statues and other monuments that have been “improperly removed or changed in the last five years to perpetuate a false revision of history or improperly minimize or disparage certain historical figures or events.”
On Thursday, Racist-in-Chief Donald Trump signs a history revisionist-pandering executive order to restore racist monuments that were removed during the early 2020s racial reckoning and the removal of “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” (read: non-white-centric history) from the Smithsonian and other federal museums and national parks.
See Also:
AP: Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for programs with ‘improper ideology’
Anyone who’s clamoring for President Donald Trump to bring down inflation and right the economy will have to keep ...
Emily Singer at Daily Kos:
Anyone who’s clamoring for President Donald Trump to bring down inflation and right the economy will have to keep waiting, since his administration is focused on more important things—like bringing back Confederate monuments.
The National Park Service announced on Monday that the Trump administration is reinstalling a statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general from Arkansas who wanted to expel free Black people from his state, in Washington, D.C. The statue, which sat near the U.S. Capitol, was removed in 2020 after being toppled by protesters.
According to NPS, the statue is being reinstated to support “both the Executive Order on Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful and the Executive Order on Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which direct federal agencies to protect public monuments and present a full and accurate picture of the American past."
But this isn’t the only way that Trump is honoring Confederate traitors.
Unqualified and reckless Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth restored the names of Confederate generals on military bases in July, a move hailed by Racist in Chief Trump.
“Can you believe they changed that name in the last administration for a little bit? We’ll forget all about that,” Trump said during a speech in North Carolina at Fort Bragg, named after Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg.
What’s more, Trump is also seeking to extort the D.C.’s NFL team into changing its name from the Commanders back to the R**skins, a racist slur against Native Americans.
Racist Confederate monuments are welcomed back in Trump’s hellhole vision of America, with the return of the Confederate traitor Albert Pike’s statue that was toppled by Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
See Also:
The Guardian: Trump administration to reinstall Confederate statue toppled in Black Lives Matter protests
