Turning Out For History

March 28th, 2026. Almost exactly a year ago, on March 27th, 2025, President Donald

J. Trump issued an executive order titled, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.

The order asserted that, 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 claimed, as Trump did in his first term, that historical revision was reconstructing

our nation's unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,

as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise erudemably flawed.

Trump has claimed, since his first term, that a left-wing mob is trying to demolish

our heritage so they can replace it with a new oppressive regime that they alone control.

He told his followers that they are in a battle to save the heritage, history, and greatness

of our country.

Embracing the idea that there is a perfect past currently being destroyed, Trump echoes

20th century fascists who promised to return their country to divinely inspire rules that,

if ignored, would create disaster.

Trump's order called for putting his ideology in place, turning federal historic sites,

parks, and museums into solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of

our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect union, and

unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.

The order directed the secretary of the interior to determine whether, since January 1, 2020,

public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the department

of the interior's jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction

of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or

figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.

To restore their previous content and to make sure that they do not contain descriptions,

depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living, including

persons living in colonial times, and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and

progress of the American people, or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance,

and grandeur of the American landscape.

Having administration officials' eyes on the Smithsonian Institution, it said,

museums and our nation's capital should be places where individuals go to learn, not to

be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared

history.

Trump's order named a three-person team to review the Smithsonian's museums, including

his Florida Criminal Defense Attorney Lindsay Halligan, who joined his team from the field

of property law, and who, as legal analyst Anna Bauer observed, didn't like some of

the museum's exhibits when she visited after the inauguration, so she convinced Trump to

sign an executive order putting her in charge.

Also on the team is Russell Vote, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and

a key author of Project 2025.

Since then, Trump's people have tried to rewrite American history according to their ideology.

Interestingly, one of the first things the administration did to alter the past was to

remove from a U.S. military cemetery in the Netherlands two displays that recognized

black soldiers who helped liberate Europe from the Nazis.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgham issued his own order on May 20, 2025, also titled, Restoring

Truth and Sanity to American History.

He told officials at all National Park Service sites to make sure information in the park

adhered to Trump's demands and to ask the public to let them know if they had any signs

or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that failed

to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.

By July 2025, National Park Service teams were trying to figure out what the vague order

not to inappropriately disparage Americans meant, flagging exhibits on sea-level rise due

to climate change at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, human enslavement

at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, and the imprisonment of Seminole,

Ryan's, Arapaho's, Kaya was, Comanche's, Cato's, and Apache's at the Castillo de San

Marcos National Monument in Florida.

On August 12, 2025, Trump's Smithsonian team wrote to Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the historian

who serves as the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, informing him they intend to review

museum exhibitions, curatorial processes, planning, the use of collections and artists' grants

in order to make sure they align with the president's directive to celebrate American exceptionalism,

remove divisive or partisan narratives and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.

They said they were focusing on 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 Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

On December 18, 2025, they wrote to Bunch again to complain he had not provided as much

information as they had requested.

They expressed concern that the museums of the Smithsonian Institution be well positioned

to play an important role during the historic year-long celebration of our nation's 250th

birthday that is fast approaching.

We wish to be assured that none of the leadership of the Smithsonian museums is confused

about the fact that the United States has been among the greatest forces for good in

the history of the world.

They wrote.

The American people will have no patience for any museum that is dividend about America's

founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history, one which

is justifiably proud of our country's accomplishments and record.

At about the same time, Trump unveiled that the history he intended to see shared was

one that remade the U.S. by destroying its complicated history of struggle toward multicultural

democracy and rewriting it as a dictatorship.

In mid-December, the White House revealed that Trump had attached partisan descriptions

of previous presidents on the presidential walk of fame at the White House, calling Democratic

President Barack Obama one of the most divisive figures in American history, and Joe Biden

by far the worst president in American history.

Being office as a result of the most corrupt election ever seen in the United States,

it continued, Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our nation to the

brink of destruction.

Trump described himself, though, as the architect of the greatest economy in the history

of the world.

Then on the fifth anniversary of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, the White

House unveiled a new website blaming the Democrats for the attack and saying Trump had corrected

a historic wrong by pardoning the rioters.

Under pressure from the White House, the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery

removed taxed by Trump's portrait that referred to Trump's two impeachments as well as his

loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

In January, the National Park Service took down displays about the enslavement of nine

black Americans at the home of President George Washington and First Lady Martha Washington

in Philadelphia, and the city sued.

In February, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Roof, who was appointed by President George W. Bush,

ruled that the materials must be put back as the case works its way through the courts.

She began her order with a quotation from George Orwell's 1984, a novel based on the premise

that an authoritarian regime constantly rewrote history for its own ends.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the erasure of American history in favor of

a whitewash authoritarianism.

The American people began to preserve the truth of who we have been.

Researchers worried at the potential loss of National Park Service information created

the Save Our Signs Project, a crowdsourced archive of photographs from National Parks.

Historians appalled by changes to the Smithsonian, created citizen historians for the Smithsonian,

similarly documenting changes to the Smithsonian.

One of its leaders, James Millward, is a scholar of Chinese history and is concerned that

history being snipped and clipped and disappeared looks a great deal like the methods of the Chinese Communist Party.

Sitting next to Trump's portrait in the portrait gallery, he handed visitors copies of the old text

until guards closed the exhibit.

At the Organization of American Historians, the History Archives and Records Preservation Project,

or Harp, is made up of historians, archivists, librarians, and their allies,

who are recording changes since January 2025 that threaten the historical record.

Even more dramatically though, today's Americans are demanding the preservation

not just of who we have been, but of who we are.

Far from accepting the administration's white-washed assertion that the nation has an unparalleled legacy

of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.

We are remembering our complicated history of community struggle and mobilizing to protect our right

to govern ourselves against those who would take that right from us.

Millions of Americans and their allies turned out today for more than 3,100 no-kings events

in all 50 states, US territories, Washington, D.C., and towns and cities around the world

in what appears to be the largest one-day protest in American history.

Instead of accepting the destruction of the true lessons of our past,

we are bringing them back to life.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.

It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead and Massachusets, recorded with music composed

by Michael Moss.