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.” The order then instructed Vice President J. D. Vance, the Assistant to the President on Domestic Policy Vince Haley (a former speechwriter and advisor to Newt Gingrich as well as Trump), the Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to conduct an overhaul of the Smithsonian. These four authorities on American history would work closely with the policy’s West Wing overseer, Senior Associate Staff Secretary Lindsey Halligan, the former Florida insurance lawyer and Trump loyalist who went on to serve illegally as interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia until she was removed by a federal court order early in 2026. Trump’s historiographical diktat further instructed Secretary Burgum “to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” that had been removed to “inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures,” which sounded like a euphemism for placing disgraced Confederate soldiers and politicians back on their pedestals. Right-wing outcries about left-wing historical distortions, predictably exaggerated and partial to conspiratorial thinking, are by no means uniformly meretricious, which thwarts any blanket condemnation of Trump’s order. The reluctance of liberals and progressives to call out those distortions on their own terms, a distortion of their own, is an abiding intellectual deformation that gives political hostages to the right. In making a federal case out of wokeness, however, the Trump White House, while exploiting a convenient target to arouse its political base and its band of academic acolytes, chiefly intends to expand presidential power further by commandeering and subjugating previously autonomous or semi-autonomous public institutions that have anything to do with history, including the National Archives. Not only will the administration control, as far as possible, how history is conveyed; it will also control the information upon which future generations — or, in the shorter run, potential grand juries — will judge Donald Trump and his associates. The “unitary executive” theory evidently extends to authorizing the president and his underlings to determine as far as possible not just which versions of our past should be honored and which repudiated, but also the materials from which future historians will treat the present. L’histoire, c’est moi. In their rebuttals to Executive Order 14253, the professional historians’ associations conjured visions of a Trump administration hellbent on imposing, to the limits of its powers, an atavistic account of the American past. Sanitized Trumpian history, the Organization of American Historians declared, would “reflect a glorified narrative that downplays or disappears elements of America’s history — slavery, segregation, discrimination, division — while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.” Put differently, the administration aims to suppress the history writing of the last sixty years, which was significantly inspired by the civil rights movement, and revive a worshipful pre-1960s view of the American past in line with its restorationist vision of the American future. If only that was all that the Trump regime has in mind. 
Although no student of history, President Trump has very strong views of his place in it, which offer clues about his regime’s actual historical significance. That self-image is fully displayed on the wall of the West Colonnade of the White House, now dubbed (with a Hollywood touch) the Presidential Walk of Fame, in a series of newly installed bronze plaques that describe each American president. Complementing the dictator chic of the proposed Trump ballroom and the redecorated Oval Office festooned with gold appliqués, the Walk of Fame conveys a faux authority, as if the plaques were wrought by Clio herself. Relatively few people will ever see them except for Trump — who can see them daily, even several times a day, as long he is not at Mar-a-Lago or holed up in the private residence upstairs — along with visiting dignitaries whom the president wants to impress. The exclusivity, though, is in part the point. Housed in an inner temple of the White House, the plaques and their accompanying portraits stand as tablets of revealed historical truth with official authorization, banishing all doubts, fears, and confusions about the standing of presidents past and present and Trump’s place among them. For its chief audience of one, it is the ultimate in the ego-fortifying branding that he craves. For his guests, it is a firm reminder of who’s in charge. As much as the texts on the plaques, the narcissism of the display’s privileged venue reflects the narcissism of its creator. Fifty-one plaques describe forty-five presidents. From George Washington through George W. Bush, each man receives one plaque, except for Grover Cleveland, whose nonconsecutive terms get two. Suddenly, though, Barack Obama rates two plaques, apparently because one did not suffice to include all of the abuse heaped upon him: “the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable Care Act’;” “a stagnant economy;” “the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal;” topped off by how Obama “spied on the Presidential Campaign of Donald J. Trump, and presided over the creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, the worst political scandal in American History.” The same need to pile on the invective explains why “Sleepy Joe Biden . . . by far the worst President in American History” who “brought our Nation to the brink of destruction” also gets two plaques, his portrait contemptuously replaced by a picture of an autopen. The two plaques devoted to Trump’s first term consist, naturally, of a series of superlatives, among other things crediting him, preposterously, for creating (in Truth Social
Untruth and Insanity in American History
