Because the nation marked its 250th anniversary this summer season, Donald Trump couldn’t cease posting AI-generated photos of himself alongside George Washington. In a single, Trump and Washington experience horses via a bucolic panorama, the solar setting within the distance. In one other, Trump saves Washington from falling off a cliff; this one is styled as a film poster for a time-traveling buddy cop movie. These are along with the very actual photos of Washington’s and Trump’s faces hanging facet by facet on large banners exterior the Division of Inside constructing.
Greater than any others although, Trump posted photos of him and George Washington within the proposed White Home ballroom. There’s one by which Trump holds rolled up architectural plans (in an already-completed ballroom) whereas mentioning some distant characteristic to George. In one other they each stand within the ballroom staring immediately on the digicam; even from the entrance you’ll be able to inform they’ve each adopted Trump’s signature ass-out posture. There are at the very least 5 completely different variations of this explicit scene.
Trump’s insistence on posting photos of himself alongside George Washington affords the proper distillation of how he thinks about historical past. For him, historical past is synonymous with superstar—and there could possibly be no increased honor for our historic VIPs to be feted in Trump’s glimmering new ballroom. Unwilling, for apparent causes, to attend for historical past’s judgment, Trump makes use of AI to position himself alongside the previous’s most well-known figures.
Throughout his second time period in workplace, Trump has tried to reshape the nation’s museums based on this facile logic, seeing them as little greater than halls of fame; like Madame Tussaud’s or the celebs alongside Hollywood Boulevard, they’re locations to recollect the names of well-known folks, after which recognize simply how well-known they’re. This would possibly all be comical if administration officers and a coterie of opportunists weren’t utilizing Trump’s handy fascination with superstar as a automobile for advancing their very own long-held ends. Although barely extra intellectually strong (if no much less dishonest) than Trump’s name-dropping, they’ve censored some histories and completely recast others to propagate a distorted, slim, and blithely celebratory imaginative and prescient of American historical past.
That is at odds with the work that historical past museums truly do. What’s extra, it presents a model of historical past that People repeatedly insist they don’t need.
For roughly so long as the nation has been round, histories of america have used heroic figures to encourage patriotism or instill classes in ethical character. The primary biographies of George Washington—they started to appear inside months of his dying—made him a logo of American advantage. The volumes had been usually devoted to the “youth of America” and centered on Washington’s “personal virtues,” like sacrifice, dedication, piety, or thrift. This emergent, mythic Washington was a mannequin for youngsters to emulate to grow to be good People. In his 1807 biography, South Carolina politician and historian David Ramsay urged America’s youth to see that Washington’s “life affords the brightest mannequin for imitation.”
An identical concentrate on how “nice males” formed the nation and the world endured all through a lot of the nineteenth century. These works didn’t solely concentrate on a small variety of “heroes”; they usually urged that these people had been marked for greatness since start via some genetic predisposition or divine choice. The good man concept of historical past is usually linked to the Scottish author and early historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote in 1840 that “The Historical past of the World,” was little greater than “the Biography of Nice Males.”
But as historical past formalized into an expert self-discipline within the early twentieth century, it started to jettison the work of gentleman students that had outlined a lot of the earlier century and as an alternative adopted more and more rigorous, evidence-based strategies. Historians started emphasizing the methods by which broader, extra impersonal financial, social, and political forces had formed the lives and actions of political and army leaders. These “New Historical past” students insisted that American historical past wasn’t nearly George Washington, but additionally about odd folks and materials situations.
For some, this transformation was an excessive amount of to bear; extra importantly, it stood in rigidity with what they seen as historical past’s civic function, specifically, offering inspirational classes for youngsters. Some People objected, trying to maintain the “New Historical past” out of colleges and confined to school seminars the place it belonged. They insisted that solely an emphasis on “heroes” might correctly educate the nation’s younger folks at a time of profound social upheaval. State legal guidelines tried to bar texts that may “defame our nation’s founders” or “belittle illustrious American patriots.” What’s extra, these objections got here not solely from teams just like the KKK, who sought to protect reverence for white founders, but additionally from African-People and different ethnic teams who sought to position their very own ancestors alongside them within the American pantheon. “All these teams,” historian Jonathan Zimmerman has written, “rallied behind hero worship in historical past, difficult any textual content that dared to query the braveness or conduct of America’s multi-ethnic founders.”
A century later, Trump’s fawning over icons of the previous affords an excellent shallower interpretation of historical past than even the earliest proponents of the “nice man” method to historical past. Whereas earlier generations of writers and students might have overestimated the significance of particular person figures in shaping world occasions in service of educating broader ethical classes, Trump celebrates the previous’s most well-known figures for his or her fame alone. Whereas early biographies might have rigorously prevented mentioning that George Washington owned slaves, in 2023 Trump instructed an viewers outright that “he in all probability didn’t.” For Trump, it appears, historic relevance doesn’t simply begin at superstar—it ends there too.
This tendency at the very least explains a few of Trump’s extra mystifying statements. Like how he might, in 2017, categorical his gratitude that the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition honored Frederick Douglass, “any person who’s performed an incredible job and is being acknowledged increasingly,” whereas final 12 months complaining that the museum focuses an excessive amount of on “how unhealthy slavery was.” Honoring individuals who Trump has heard of is sweet; speaking about their lives in ways in which would possibly make him unhappy is unhealthy.
It additionally helps clarify Trump’s objections to the recontextualization or removing of monuments and statues of historic figures. When protests towards racial injustice in the summertime of 2020 questioned who we, as a nation, fairly actually select to placed on pedestals, they focused monuments of individuals like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and different enslavers. Trump decried this in a serious speech at Mount Rushmore on July 4. “We’ll by no means allow them to rip America’s heroes from our monuments,” he stated.
He went on to carry these concepts to their largest and dumbest potential conclusion: the “Nationwide Backyard of American Heroes.” Changing into considered one of Trump’s signature initiatives for commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary, the proposed “Backyard” would carry collectively statues of 250 “legends of America’s previous” so that they could possibly be appropriately honored. The record of figures to be included within the statue backyard reads extra like a textbook index than a critical proposal. It’s a dizzying, logic-defying mixture of presidents {and professional} athletes, authors and inventors, generals and civil rights heroes, all linked by little greater than title recognition. Kobe Bryant is on the record. John Glenn, John Adams, John Muir, Johnny Appleseed, and Johnny Money all made the reduce. So too did Sam Houston and Whitney Houston; Billy Graham and Billie Vacation; Marie Curie, notably not American, is in there.
Now that the 250th has handed, together with Trump’s consideration, it appears unlikely the backyard will ever come to fruition. Nonetheless, it affords a neat illustration of Trump’s view of historical past. In accordance with Trump, statues are “silent lecturers” that “encourage those that are to come back.” On this formulation, a gross simplification of the “nice man” faculty, the whole thing of the previous exists for the inspiration of the current and there’s no higher method to try this than by remembering some guys.
This infantile conception of historical past is what makes the photographs of Trump and Washington within the ballroom so apropos. For Trump, historic figures are little greater than VIPs who needs to be fawned over and handled properly, and he actually believes he belongs alongside them. One mustn’t, simply to tug examples at random right here, discuss in regards to the a long time they spent proudly owning different folks as property, or their shut friendships with the nation’s most infamous intercourse prison. Interrogating who these folks had been or what they did or the broader cultural, social, or political contexts by which they lived—briefly, treating them “very unfairly”—isn’t simply un-American, it’s gauche, like insulting a celebration visitor.
Sadly, nevertheless, Trump’s obsession with superstar has served as a handy automobile for better-read conservatives to advance their very own long-standing views of historical past. These efforts go far past Trump’s concern about whether or not we’re correctly appreciating Evel Knievel’s heroism or no matter, as an alternative utilizing “nice man” historical past in lecture rooms and museums to encourage uncritical nationwide pleasure.
To grasp at this time’s historical past controversies, we’ve to additionally perceive the longer trajectory of America’s “historical past wars.” Within the second half of the twentieth century, historians continued to remodel each how and what they investigated within the nation’s previous. Amid actions to attain each civil rights and girls’s liberation, historians more and more instructed tales about odd folks—doing historical past “from the bottom up”—and emphasised the methods race, gender, and sophistication had been key to how we seen historic developments. Armed with new strategies and sources, historians started increasing whose tales counted as a part of our historical past.
As with the emergence of “New Historical past” 50 years earlier, this new “social historical past” confronted backlash, notably within the classroom. In 1959, author E. Merrill Root complained that historical past texts solely emphasised America’s faults and solely linked patriotism with “the excesses of the extremist.” When California tried within the mid-Nineteen Sixties to undertake textbooks that higher mirrored latest scholarship’s emphasis on a extra inclusive imaginative and prescient of the nation’s historical past and other people, some complained about “derogatory statements allegedly made about well-known People.” Historical past class, they claimed, was no place to “debunk our heroes.” Reflecting on the episode for The Atlantic in 1967, historian Harry N. Scheiber famous that the American proper “instructions each ample funds and ample public relations experience to conduct a extremely efficient marketing campaign towards textbooks that offend conservative ideas of patriotism.”
Scheiber’s commentary was prescient. Within the a long time that adopted, conservatives had way more successes than failures when it got here to figuring out the content material of textbooks and faculty curricula. In 1985, conservative Texas training activists Mel and Norma Gabler revealed a e book titled What Are They Instructing Our Youngsters? They complained about textbooks’ lack of consideration to nationwide heroes. They requested, “Who deserves extra consideration in an American historical past textual content: George Washington or Marilyn Monroe?” Because of conservative activism—and the large Texas market—textbooks across the nation have grow to be extra centered on the founders over the previous three a long time, at the same time as historic scholarship has largely moved the opposite course. In accordance with an evaluation by scholar Rachel D. Hutchins, George Washington appeared in elementary faculty textbooks on common about 5 occasions in 1982. By 2003, that quantity had grown to 17.
Within the Nineteen Nineties, amid concern that American college students had been falling behind in an more and more globalized world, there was a short effort to determine nationwide requirements for historical past training. Conservatives sunk that plan after years of labor due to the proposed requirements’ supposed inattention to American heroes. “Think about a top level view for the educating of American historical past by which George Washington makes solely a fleeting look,” wrote former Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities chair Lynne Cheney, criticizing the requirements. In accordance with her, these tips lacked a correct “tone of affirmation.”
Extra just lately, after The 1619 Mission tried to reorient the framing of American historical past to position slavery on the middle, adopted by the broader in style effort in 2020 to reassess the nation’s legacy of slavery and racism and the position of many conventional “heroes” in perpetuating it, conservatives but once more doubled down on “patriotic” historical past. Between 2021 and 2024, Republican-led legislatures throughout the nation launched a whole bunch of what free speech advocacy group PEN America has termed “academic gag orders” to ban the educating of essential race concept, and even simply “divisive ideas.” Dozens of these payments grew to become legislation.
By nearly any measure, conservatives have gained the historical past training controversies of the previous 50 years; for essentially the most half, it’s been a rout. So, with this undertaking seemingly full by the point Trump returned to workplace in 2025, conservatives’ focus shifted to the following enviornment: museums.
This battle kicked off in March of final 12 months when Trump issued an govt order titled “Restoring Fact and Sanity to American Historical past.” In impact, the order demanded the removing of content material that may “inappropriately disparage” well-known People at any federal historical past installations, specifically the Smithsonian museums and Nationwide Park Service websites. Within the 12 months that adopted, the Division of the Inside eliminated interpretive signage and publications and redacted web site content material from dozens of NPS websites to adjust to the order. Probably the most notable amongst these was the removing of an out of doors exhibit on the “President’s Home Website” in Philadelphia that instructed the story of the folks George Washington enslaved whereas serving as President. Park Service workers first started eradicating the indicators in January of 2026 and, after months of authorized wrangling, changed it with a brand new exhibit in June. The new exhibit makes use of Washington’s personal statements opposing slavery to color him as an early abolitionist.
(Disclosure: The American Affiliation for State and Native Historical past, the place I labored from 2017 to Could 2026 and for which I now function a analysis guide, is likely one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit towards the Division of the Inside difficult the removing of content material at Nationwide Park Service websites.)
Throughout this second time period, the Trump administration has additionally cancelled grants to historical past museums and others from the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Providers. In its try to intestine the NEH, the DOGE boys cancelled something ChatGPT designated as “woke.” The NEH even started redirecting funds to statues for Trump’s Nationwide Backyard of American Heroes; it later settled for a scholar artwork contest. IMLS has remained open regardless of big layoffs, however now recommends grant candidates learn and think about the “Fact and Sanity” govt order.
On July 4, 2026—the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence—the White Home’s Home Coverage Council issued a report denouncing the Smithsonian’s presentation of American historical past. Stuffed with conservative mental jargon, the 162-page report accuses the Smithsonian of “ideological seize” and of trying “to divide, discourage, and dispirit our residents.” Predictably, the report complains that guests to the Nationwide Museum of American Historical past (NMAH) “will discover no main exhibit devoted to America’s founding period, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, different founding fathers, the Continental Congress, the pilgrims, the Puritans or main moments of the American Revolution.”
The govt order the White Home issued to take motion on the report complained that the historical past shared by NMAH didn’t embrace a ample expression of “gratitude.” The order additionally instructs the Division of Inside to set up signage exterior NMAH to warn guests of the alleged distortions they’ll discover inside and to direct them to different (as but unnamed) assets on American historical past.
Donald Trump, for his half, provided an excellent less complicated answer: Erect a large statue of George Washington in entrance of the museum.
The administration’s concentrate on museums, whether or not that’s accusing them of indoctrination on a grand scale or lamenting that they do something past providing an opportunity to marvel slack-jawed at titans of yore, each belie a elementary misunderstanding about what historical past museums are and what they do.
The US is house to greater than 21,000 historical past museums and associated organizations—historic societies, historic homes, historic websites and the like. There are extra historical past museums in America than there are public libraries or McDonald’s. In lots of communities, they’re one of many few nonprofit establishments apart from church buildings. But whereas the time period “museum” would possibly recall to mind locations just like the Smithsonian or The Met, most historical past museums are operated on shoestring budgets by ageing volunteers for the nice of a small group. Their ubiquity and the quantity of volunteer time wanted to make most of them run reveal simply how deeply dedicated People are to the civic undertaking of preserving and sharing their historical past.
Certainly, regardless of a basic lack of assets, historical past museums throughout the nation do way over simply show outdated objects in glass circumstances. More and more, museums invite the communities they’re serving into the method, collaborating with them as companions in analysis, exhibit improvement, and programming. Quite than a couple of consultants deciding what tales to inform and the best way to inform them, museums are actually remarkably participatory.
What’s extra, People belief museums. Current analysis from the American Alliance of Museums revealed that People belief museums greater than every other data supply exterior of “family and friends” or “public libraries.”
What People don’t appear to need is whitewashed, censored variations of the previous. For instance, a latest survey discovered 69 % of People opposed efforts to strain museums into eradicating sure sorts of content material. Additionally they categorical extremely broad settlement that historical past ought to embrace the nice, the unhealthy, and all of the messy complexity in between. In 2022, 87 % of Democrats agreed that “George Washington and Abraham Lincoln needs to be admired for his or her roles in American historical past,” whereas 83 % of Republicans agreed that “it’s essential that each American scholar find out about slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.” A research from the American Historic Affiliation discovered that two-third of People agreed it was essential to show about historic injustices, even when that makes folks uncomfortable.
Again and again People clarify that it isn’t woke social justice museums they’re apprehensive about; they typically belief museums to do their work. They usually don’t need what the Trump administration is providing them: a model of the previous that has been edited and distorted for political ends. Folks can see the distinction between Madame Tussaud’s and a historical past museum. They don’t assume a stroll down the Hollywood Stroll of Fame affords substantive classes in regards to the previous. Irrespective of how tall or shiny the statues, most People don’t settle for them as a stand-in for precise, attention-grabbing, academic historical past. The unpopularity of this method is exactly why the Trump administration finds it crucial to make use of the facility of the federal authorities—by censoring content material, cancelling grants, and issuing govt orders—to put in its worldview. That’s not historical past; that’s propaganda. And it’s why these efforts, identical to practically all censorship efforts ever, are doomed to fail.
