Five weeks into his second term, President Donald J. Trump issued Executive Order 14253, entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” For more than a decade, the order declared, a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” had been “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” Trump singled out the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service, institutions under federal purview, for portraying American (and Western) values as inherently harmful and oppressive. True to form, he blamed the Biden administration for advancing “this corrosive ideology.”
Untruth and Insanity in American History
