President Donald Trump came to power with “Make America Great Again” as his central slogan. It is a rhetorical move that is premised on a past of greatness. America’s past, however, was not great for many groups. For Indigenous people and Black people in particular, the past is defined by slavery and dislocation, by tragedy and brutality. Trump needs to hide those inconvenient truths because they complicate his message and undermine his attacks on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts promoted by, according to Trump, the so-called “radical left.” Trump has focused on these efforts and the “woke agenda” as his favorite enemy because he wants his core supporters of mostly white followers to blame the left and affirmative action efforts as the reason for any economic decline they have experienced. According to Justice Luís Barroso of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil, “One feature of authoritarian populism is the need to have enemies and to have some social group to blame. As we have seen recently, the blame now is diversity—diversity has become the ‘cause of accidents.’” Diversity has been blamed for everything from aviation disasters to inflation. Trump wants to shape a narrative where DEI makes no sense because the past is pure and every individual has an equal shot to succeed regardless of background. To deny structural inequities, you need to hide the scaffolding of those structures.
Trump is thus attempting to rewrite US history to disclaim historical and structural discrimination in favor of a narrative in which disparities are credited to individual failings. The nation has only relatively recently begun to grapple with troubled aspects of its past, including slavery and the displacement of Native Americans, but Trump is trying to erase the progress that has been made in confronting past injustices. His target? Anything on National Park Service property that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans.” A March executive order from Trump, with a compliance deadline of September 17, mandates the National Park Service to remove books in its gift shops and museums that portray America poorly. Parks have already removed exhibits explaining how Native peoples took care of the lands in Muir Woods and information about climate change, and officials have reportedly told park employees to take down numerous items related to mentions of the atrocities of slavery. This battleground is well-chosen. Trump, as executive, has near-total control over the Department of the Interior, which runs the parks, so it is easier for him to decree his vision of America there than in other arenas like schools or privately funded museums. While Trump has also pushed for the Smithsonian Institute to emphasize a message of American greatness, which he compares to an emphasis on “how bad slavery was,” he does not control the Smithsonian directly the way he does the Department of the Interior. By censoring narratives that highlight racial inequality, Trump appeals to his supporters and simultaneously shields his allies who need these existing hierarchies to maintain their power. Trump may try to shape American opinion, but he cannot control it. His effort to censor the truth on publicly owned land can and should be vigorously opposed as an effort to hide uncomfortable truths about America’s history with race that are better addressed head-on.
Donald Trump’s campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” depends on his supporters believing that there was an idyllic past—that America was once great and should be restored. It is a vision that particularly exalts historical white America as unblemished and leaves out minority groups and their oppression from the narrative. He has glowingly noted that “Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth […] [and] pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness” without ever mentioning the Indigenous people who already lived there—or the genocide enacted against them. Anyone who studies American history knows it is a complicated one, but the Trump Administration is trying to cover up any blemishes in America’s past.
One of the most significant targeted images from the Civil War period is a photograph from 1863 of a formerly enslaved man with scars all over his back called “The Scourged Back.” Another site at risk is the exhibits related to slavery at the Harpers Ferry National Historic Site, which detail John Brown’s historical raid on Harpers Ferry. Furthermore, Trump is instructing park employees to take down certain signs that highlight the atrocities of the Civil War or that critically refer to “Lost Cause” portrayals—revisionist views that glorify the Confederacy and deny the fact that slavery caused the Civil War. By taking down these signs, the administration is sanitizing our true history.
These efforts are not trivial. The National Park Service reported more than 331 million recreational visits last year, so changing the narrative reaches a broad audience. It is an audience that includes a broad swath of America because national parks attract the rich and the poor alike. They also attract international visitors, with almost 10 percent of park visitors who participated in surveys indicating they reside outside the United States. The material that is allowed at or banned from these spaces are the histories that leave lasting impressions on people’s perceptions of the American story. Thus, the information at a national park is likely to influence both domestic and international tourists, many of whom will not do more research on a topic or seek out a different narrative. Trump’s executive order commands museums to participate in “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” In fact, the order hides truths because it is whitewashing aspects of America’s past.
There is a long precedent in the United States for censoring aspects of history, particularly erasing or softening parts of US history that may paint the dominant white culture in a negative light. In the aftermath of the Civil War, pro-Confederate narratives immediately sought to shift the perception of the war away from a fight between enslaved people and their enemies, instead casting the conflict as the product of abstract conflict about “states’ rights.” This narrative shift created a trend known as the Lost Cause. On Juneteenth, Trump lamented there were too many non-working holidays, while simultaneously arguing that an existing holiday needed a different focus: He boasted that “I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes.” No longer would that holiday focus on Indigenous people, but instead would revert back to focusing on Christopher Columbus, who brutally killed so many of them as he took their lands. Trump is picking and choosing the people and causes he wants to celebrate and commemorate to craft a narrative where white people are the heroes.
By censoring national parks, Trump is trying to further cement ideas relating to a Lost Cause agenda—ideas that run counter to a lot of the progress won by civil rights movements in recent years. Thus, by implementing censorship and specific narratives in national parks, Trump is keeping inconvenient truths hidden so the struggles of people of color revert to the shadows and white people do not have to confront the echoes of those abuses today in structural inequality.
This whitewashing in the parks is a close cousin to other censorship efforts. Trump’s censorship strategy allows him to cater to his core supporters while trying to win over converts by changing their view of America’s past. Trying to hide inconvenient historical truths is not foreign to many places in the world. Japan, for example, has been criticized for insufficiently confronting the atrocities it committed during World War II, and the government has censored references to the Nanjing Massacre and comfort women in school textbooks to paint the country in a better light. This contrasts sharply with Germany’s response. Germany has confronted its past directly, refusing to hide the horrors of the Holocaust and instead commemorating the victims with museums and monuments condemning antisemitism and showing the devastation of the Holocaust.
Trump has no interest in confronting the United States’ past or seeking a path of reconciliation. Instead, he is trying to use the government to the maximum extent possible to create a vision of America that is dominated by white Christians with minorities on the sidelines. In the parks, he is seeking to do that with the imagery and books available. This is part of a broader effort that is reflected in his policies attacking immigration and DEI programs. The fight over national parks is more than solely a dispute over the text in museums but rather an attempt at whitewashing the past and an attempt to decide who gets to define the past and America’s national identity. These ideas, ingrained into the gift shops and museums of federal sites, influence how future generations and visitors view America. Authoritarian tendencies are alive and well in the United States, showing how Trump can embed himself and conservative policies into everyday landscapes that should be a neutral site. This battle over park pictures is really a debate over whether America decides to remember itself honestly or live in a dystopian fantasy.
While fascist leaders have reshaped their country’s narratives after assuming power, it is much harder to pull off an authoritarian nationalist narrative in a democracy with a free press and freedom of speech. Even if Trump tries to shape government speech, Americans can and should speak out. Initiatives like the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)’s Community Remembrance Project offer a blueprint. EJI is documenting examples of racial violence and honoring victims of violent racist acts with markers in various public locations. Displays like these can help amplify the true, factual picture of United States history. Active resistance and political participation are key to revealing the truth. There is an adage that “history is written by the victors.” In America, this battle can still be won.