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Foreign. 2026 almost exactly a year ago, on March 27, 2025, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. The order asserted that over 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 irredeemably 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 promise to return their country to divinely inspired 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, an 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 faul 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. Setting administration officials eyes on the Smithsonian Institution, it said museums in 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 Vogt, 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. Revealingly, one of the first things the administration did to alter the past was to remove from a US Military cemetery in the Netherlands to two displays that recognized black soldiers who helped liberate Europe from the Nazis. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum 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, either past or living Americans, or that fail 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 Seminoles, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, Comanches, Caddos and Apaches 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 Hirshhorn 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 diffident 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 US 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. Taking 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 US 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 text 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 whitewashed authoritarianism, the American people began to preserve the truth of of who we have been. Volunteers 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 whitewashed 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, U.S. 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.
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Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.