{"id":136178,"date":"2025-05-04T17:18:20","date_gmt":"2025-05-04T17:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/historians-alarmed-as-trump-seeks-to-rewrite-us-story-for-250th-anniversary-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-05-04T17:18:20","modified_gmt":"2025-05-04T17:18:20","slug":"historians-alarmed-as-trump-seeks-to-rewrite-us-story-for-250th-anniversary-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/historians-alarmed-as-trump-seeks-to-rewrite-us-story-for-250th-anniversary-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Historians alarmed as Trump seeks to rewrite US story for 250th anniversary – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ignorance no barrier as president begins to put out approved version of history that ignores American failures
Donald Trump<\/a>, it could be said, takes a breezy, Sam Cooke<\/a> style approach to history.
Like the legendary \u201cking of soul\u201d in his 1960 hit Wonderful World<\/a>, the US president has admitted to not knowing much about historical events or figures of the past \u2013 even when faced with authorities on the subject.
Recalling a conversation at Mar-a-Lago shortly after Trump\u2019s 2016 election victory, the American historian Douglas Brinkley recently recounted his shock when Trump \u2013 who has mused about having his name carved on Mount Rushmore <\/a>alongside the nation\u2019s most celebrated presidents \u2013 told him he had never read a book about Abraham Lincoln<\/a>.
\u201cHe was thinking about what he would do for his inaugural address, and he said he knew nothing about past history,\u201d Brinkley told a webinar organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace<\/a>.
\u201cIt startled me, because when you talk to politicians, they even make up books. They pretend they read a lot. He just kind of shrugged it off and told me that he was a visual guy. That translated as his sense of history in a true sense began with John F Kennedy.\u201d
Ignorance, however, appears to be no barrier as Trump seeks to grasp control of the US\u2019s historical narrative in the run-up to next year\u2019s landmark celebration of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence, also known as the semiquincentennial.
Under an executive order<\/a> issued in January, the president has started to churn out his own approved version of US history that professional historians fear will resort to the tried and tested authoritarian playbook of airbrushing out inconvenient and inglorious chapters that do not align with his vision of American greatness.
\u201cHe is not now and never has been a student of history, but is basically a restorationist,\u201d said Jonathan Alter, a historian and biographer of several US presidents, including Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt. Alter described a \u201crestorationist\u201d as a \u201cpolitical figure who operates on the politics of nostalgia\u201d.
\u201cHe\u2019s ignorant of economic history, he\u2019s ignorant of political history. And his idea for the 250 is to use it as a way to celebrate him,\u201d Alter added. \u201cWe don\u2019t know yet exactly how he\u2019ll hijack that event next year, but he will certainly try to do so.\u201d
As a first step, Trump\u2019s order established himself chair of a White House taskforce 250 and vowed a \u201cgrand celebration\u201d to mark the country\u2019s 250th birthday on 4 July 2026 and \u201cother actions to honor the history of our great nation\u201d.
One of those was under way last month when the first of a series of short videos, entitled \u201cThe Story of America\u201d, was posted on the White House 250 website<\/a>. The videos were produced in partnership with Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian institution in Michigan.
In the opening video, the college\u2019s president, Larry Arnn \u2013 a former research director for Winston\u2019s Churchill official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert \u2013 drew similarities between Lincoln and Trump, citing the current president\u2019s signature slogan \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d.
\u201cHe has a famous slogan that I will not repeat here, but everybody knows what it is, and it ends with the word again,\u201d said Arnn, who did not respond to the Guardian\u2019s interview request. \u201cHe wants to do something again, something that\u2019s already been done \u2026 And it places him somewhere near the politics of Abraham Lincoln.\u201d
In another, perhaps unintended, parallel, Arnn, describing the text of the independence document, recounts how the founding fathers justified the declaration by asserting that King George III \u201cviolated 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 \u2026 and \u2026 interfered with the judicial branch\u201d.
The videos are being rolled out weeks after Trump, in another executive order, <\/a>called for a radical makeover in how the country\u2019s past is presented in federally funded museums such as the Smithsonian, and national parks.
The administration has also unveiled plans for a national garden of American heroes<\/a>, with the National Endowment for the Humanities offering partial funding for life-size sculptures of 250 notable figures from the country\u2019s past.
Yet with critics accusing the president of defying court orders, usurping powers normally reserved for Congress and of behaving like a despot, Arnn\u2019s narrative inadvertently exposes the political risks to Trump of trying to identify himself with America\u2019s revolutionary founders.
The problem for Trump, argued Johann Neem<\/a>, a professor of US history at Western Washington University, is that the revolution was a rebellion \u201cagainst tyranny and arbitrary power\u201d of the type that he is now trying to wield.
\u201cAny continuity between the actual political meaning of the revolution and what Trump is doing to our constitution is false,\u201d he said. \u201cAnybody who teaches about the American revolution knows that the thing the founders feared the most is someone like Donald Trump<\/a> \u2013 someone who would be lawless and and have arbitrary power, that\u2019s not limited by the rule of law.\u201d
Trump\u2019s bid to annex the historical narrative is part of a wider culture war, historians said, fueled in part by leftwing discourses on the central position of race in the national story. Those views were exemplified by the New York Times\u2019s 1619 Project<\/a>, which takes a critical view of some of the most revered figures in the American revolution and their attitudes to slavery.
The Pulitzer-winning project drew a splenetic response from Trump, who attacked it as \u201ctotally discredited\u201d and typical of a leftwing critique that \u201cdefiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods and lies\u201d at a White House history event in 2020<\/a>.
\u201cThis project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom,\u201d he told the event.
In response, he commissioned a 1776 report<\/a> \u2013 released in the final days of his first term \u2013 which drew up plans for a \u201cpatriotic education\u201d that would refute teachings on issues like systemic racism and critical race theory. Critics accused the report of distorting the country\u2019s history of racism and painting a misleadingly benign picture of some of the revolution\u2019s slave-owning founding fathers and misappropriating quotes from Martin Luther King.
Neem called Trump\u2019s perspective a \u201chyper-nationalist overreaction\u201d to what he called \u201ca post-American approach\u201d adopted by some left-leaning historians who depicted racism as so central to the country\u2019s founding principle, that it left ordinary citizens feeling there was little to celebrate. The results, he warned could be a \u201csaccharine\u201d and simplified version of America\u2019s often complex national story that would amount to \u201can abuse of history\u201d and serve an \u201cautocratic playbook.\u201d
\u201cHe is speaking for a group of intellectuals and activists that truly believe progressives have corrupted American culture and have stolen their country,\u201d Neem said. \u201cThe critical turn in American history is just one piece of a larger problem and and they see historians, as well as other experts, as a kind of impurity.\u201d
Some historians are fighting back against Trump\u2019s encroachment onto their territory.
Heather Cox Richardson<\/a>, a professor of history at Boston College and a specialist in the US in the 19th century, is producing a series of 90-second videos called Journey to American Democracy she hopes will eventually be watched in school classrooms.
She predicted that Trump\u2019s efforts to control history through the taskforce 250 was doomed to fail, because other historians were seeking to project \u201cgrassroots history\u201d to a wider audience online.
\u201cWe are looking at the different ways in which our always multicultural society constructed a nation, and that is a story of extraordinary triumph, but also of missteps and tragedy,\u201d said Cox Richardson. \u201cThe idea that we had a perfect past that needs to be recovered is an ideology in service to an authoritarian, strongman, and one of the things you see with the rise of a strongman is the attempt to destroy real history.\u201d
\u201cBut if you look around the United States now, you see that the ability to affect culture is slipping away from the president\u2019s hands. The more he talks about it being this sanitized work of a few ideologically pure white leaders in the past, the more other people will speak up and say, \u2018Well, no, not really.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ignorance no barrier as president begins to put out approved version of history that ignores American failuresDonald Trump, it could be said, takes a breezy, Sam Cooke style approach to history.Like the legendary \u201cking of soul\u201d in his 1960 hit Wonderful World, the US president has admitted to not knowing much about historical events or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":136179,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}