The Trump administration took significant actions that altered the landscape of U.S. history and cultural representation, particularly concerning military honors and federal content related to diversity and discrimination. Save America’s Treasures and Administration’s Decisive Action The administration didn’t just take any action against cultural institutions. In particular, they attacked Smithsonian museums, even calling some of their exhibits unpatriotic. We’re talking about an administration that literally purged and rewrote federal webpages on inconvenient truths about slavery and discrimination. In the ensuing outcry, many of these pages were brought back as approved!
In March 2020, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which aimed to reshape the narrative surrounding America’s past. The order laid out a particularly insidious definition of anti-American history that critics say aimed to whitewash the nation’s complex past. Among the contentious actions taken under this directive was the reduction of grant funding for institutions honoring the lives of enslaved individuals.
One important piece of this paradigm shift was the military’s acknowledgement of the Wounded Knee massacre. This tragedy signed the tragic, but brutal, crescendo in the removal of Native Americans from their original homelands. In December 1890, U.S. Army soldiers killed approximately 250 Lakota Sioux individuals, many of whom were unarmed women and children. Critics quickly lashed out against the administration for its failure to rescind the Medals of Honor. These medals had been awarded to 19 soldiers from the Seventh Cavalry for their heroics during the incident.
Pete Hegseth, a prominent figure in the Trump administration and an advocate for military history reexamination, stated, “We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals.” Hegseth argued that his predecessor, Lloyd Austin, was “more interested in being politically correct than historically correct.” He emphasized the administration’s commitment to reaffirming the soldiers’ recognition, asserting that “This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.”
Opponents to these policies point to a growing practice to whitewash history as the dangerous precedent at play. As historian Karl Jacoby recently said so eloquently, he continued, “Only an administration hellbent on repeating past and future war crimes would lower themselves to dishonestly calling Wounded Knee a ‘battle’ instead of what it was. He went on to explain that “Fortunately, history does not operate the way that Hegseth would like to imagine. As it turns out, it’s never really ‘settled.’ For now, the Department of Transportation can’t force its interpretation of this series of events on everyone else!
In particular, Hegseth went directly to the heart of the Wounded Knee controversy. At his wish, for example, the Pentagon initiated moves to rename at least 10 U.S. Army bases named after Confederate generals. This repair of monuments celebrating defenders of the Confederacy earned even more criticism from all corners of American society. Moreover, he facilitated the renaming of a U.S. Navy ship that had previously honored Harvey Milk, a gay rights activist, reflecting a broader pattern of cultural reassessment during this period.
The White House’s intent to direct funding towards this effort has opened up a national discussion on the erasure and presentation of written history in America. Advocates for change argue that these efforts represent a dangerous attempt to rewrite history in a way that downplays systemic injustices faced by various communities throughout U.S. history.