Above photo: President Donald Trump signs an Executive Order to dismantle the Department of Education, Thursday, March 20, 2025, in the East Room of the White House. Official White House Joyce N. Boghosian.
We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.
Remarks of President Trump
Conference on American History
Sept. 17, 2020
I have now read almost a dozen of President Trump’s executive orders issued since January. It has been an experience I will remember. They all begin with the same statement, “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered…”
So, I feel I have a right to respond similarly: By the authority vested in me as a citizen of the United States, protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, I hereby respond to the Executive Order of March 27, 2025 on Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.
After all, I did spend 35 years teaching American history as truthfully as possible. And since then, I have written nearly 20 Missing Links in History columns for ScheerPost in an effort to help teachers and students understand what has been omitted from most of their textbooks.
Trump’s 107th executive order since his inauguration in January begins with an accusation that a “revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States … our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
While the United States does have a legacy of advancing liberty and individual rights, it did so, first, for white men with property and then, group by group, for others. By leaving out the “others,” the president’s executive order undermines the achievements of those who have successfully opposed racism, sexism and injustice.
In discussing the nature of written history Howard Zinn observed, “The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or deemphasis of important data.” The new executive order illustrates this quite well.
The suggestion that the protection of individual rights has been “reconstructed” by revisionist historians “as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” as the executive order states, is simply unfounded.
The statement that in the early years of the United States, individual rights were largely restricted to white men, cannot be credibly denied. No “revisionist reconstruction” is necessary.
Slavery, for example, was protected by the Constitution through the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause. And married women generally could not own property in their own name. The sovereignty of Indigenous people was mostly disregarded.
It is also undeniable that from the beginning, race discrimination and gender discrimination were enshrined in both law and tradition, but the struggles against them also began very early. and those are struggles to be proud of.
The more than 200 slave revolts are to be admired. And Susan B. Anthony’s comments after her conviction for voting illegally as a woman in 1872, is something to be proud of. “It was we, the people,” she said, “not we, the white male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union.”
The suggestion that teaching about the history of racism and sexism while at the same time teaching about the struggles against them is, at best, counterproductive. It implies that the undeniable successes of these movements against racial and sex-based discrimination was unimportant or unnecessary.
No one should suggest that the honest recognition of racism and sexism makes the United States “irredeemably flawed.” As I mentioned, I have written about what has been omitted from high school textbooks, but there is no textbook, no matter how compromised, that entirely neglects the American struggle to end slavery or to expand the franchise. I know of no history teacher who entirely disregards the progress this country has made in the successful struggles against racism and sexism. Ironically, the success of these movements epitomizes “the progress America has made.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center responded to this executive order Immediately by writing: “Black history is U.S. history. Women’s history is U.S. history. This country’s history is ugly and beautiful. And each historic struggle for civil rights has advanced our movement toward a truly inclusive, multiracial democracy”
Criticism Of The Smithsonian
The executive order continues with a critique of the Smithsonian Institution’s celebration of American history for coming “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
While I will leave it to the Smithsonian to respond to the wide-ranging charges, I want to respond to two specific Trumpian critiques.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” examines the role of sculpture in understanding how the concept of race was constructed in the United States. Trump quotes the Smithsonian saying that “Societies including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”
Trump criticizes this idea that race is a human construction rather than a biological fact. But I admit to a little confusion: Is the president suggesting that societies have never used race to maintain “systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement?” If so, he is clearly attempting to do what he accuses others of doing. That is, he is attempting to reconstruct the past.
Leaving aside other societies, in the history of this country, race has repeatedly been used to discriminate and thus maintain systems of privilege. Race has been used as an excuse to deny African-Americans the right to vote. Redlining led to residential segregation, and unfair lending practices led to the targeting of communities of color.
There is also, in the order, a negative reaction to the Smithsonian promoting the idea that “race is not a biological reality but a social construct.” Undoubtedly the Smithsonian does this because the vast majority of scientists agree that race is a social construct and without consistently useful biological meaning.
But why does the Trump order imply that this is wrong? Should the nature of what we call race not be talked about?
According to Scientific American, race is a poorly defined marker of diversity. It is “an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics.” And that concern is not new.
A century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois objected to race being used as a biological explanation for social and cultural differences. “He spoke out against the idea of “white” and “black” as discrete groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.”
The executive order demanding the restoration of “Truth and Sanity to American History” seems to me a renewal of Donald Trump’s first attempt in 2017 to get schools to teach a “patriotic history” in which the United States is the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.
If I read the executive order correctly, Trump’s American History would be a history cleansed of racism, sexism, white privilege and, by default, a history cleansed of all resistance to those things.
The article from The Southern Poverty Law Center cited above ends with a similar conclusion:
“President Trump is trying to glorify people who wanted to preserve chattel slavery and destroy the United States instead of honoring those who fought to make this a better nation.”
Even President Trump seems, at least in part, to agree with the Southern Poverty Law Center. He continues to insist on a patriotic history cleansed of controversy, all in the service of Making America Great Again. Although it is hard to know exactly what time period he wants to return to, I’m guessing it would be before 1913 when the income tax was introduced. His executive order ends with this:
It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to 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.
