President Trump issued a record number of executive actions in his first months in office, enacting sweeping changes in how the federal government works — and signaling his intentions to reshape how the country's stories are told.
"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 president said in an executive order entitled "Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History."
The president's actions are part of a general push-and-pull of how presidents seek to paint the past to bolster their agenda, historians say. Like many populists, Trump wants to "Make America Great Again" and champions nostalgia about a past golden age.
Trump said he wants to remind Americans of "our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing."
But many historians are sounding an alarm and say the president is going too far.
Critics worry that the executive actions taken together, for instance, would minimize or even erase achievements by women and minorities.
The Organization of American Historians says that under the Trump administration, institutions such as museums and historic parks are now "under assault." The 6,000-member group calls the president's order "a disturbing attack on core institutions and the public presentation of history, and indeed on historians and history itself."
Trump's allies defend his executive actions, saying they're meant to correct what conservatives see as attempts to skew history.
"President Trump continues to fulfill his promise in restoring truth and common sense to the United States and its institutions," White House Spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement to NPR. "President Trump is ensuring that we are celebrating true American history and ingenuity instead of corrupting it in the name of left-wing ideology."
Here's a sampling of Trump's actions, and what critics and supporters say about the battle over how the country's cultural and historical heritage should be presented.
Executive actions and orders related to history
- Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History
The March 27 executive order calls for the removal of "divisive, race-centered ideology" at the Smithsonian Institution, and instructs the Interior secretary to revoke recent changes to landmarks and monuments if they're found to "perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history." - Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities
The March 20 executive order seeks to shut down the Department of Education. It also calls for withholding federal money from programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion or "promoting gender ideology." - Continuing The Reduction Of The Federal Bureaucracy
The March 14 presidential action seeks to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which sends federal money to libraries and museums, and six other agencies. - Restoring America's Fighting Force
The Jan. 27 action abolishes DEI programs and initiatives in the military, long seen as a pioneer in America's push toward racial equality. The Trump administration later reverses a purge of Pentagon webpages featuring notable female and minority veterans. - Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling
The Jan. 29 action revives Trump's 2020 call for "patriotic education." It accuses schools of indoctrinating children in anti-American ideologies, citing gender policies and stating that "demanding acquiescence to 'White Privilege' or 'unconscious bias,' actually promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity." - Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness
Trump seeks to put his stamp on the map in this Jan. 20 action, calling for changing the name of the Alaskan mountain known as Denali back to its earlier name, Mount McKinley, and changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. - Celebrating America's 250th Birthday
The action from Jan. 29 reinstates and expands Trump's 2020 plan to create a National Garden of American Heroes. The original list includes civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett and anti-abortion activist Nellie Gray, along with actor John Wayne and Oglala Lakota war strategist Red Cloud.
Competing visions of how to view American history
It's common for U.S. presidents to consider history as they take office — and to overturn their predecessors' actions, as Joe Biden did after Trump's first term. But historians say Trump is charting new territory.
"Rather than seeking to place himself in [history], he's trying to transform it to fit him," says Jefferson Cowie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Vanderbilt University. He calls Trump's approach a "completely different kind of project" than previous presidents.
Cowie says that Trump's long-running slogan, "Make America Great Again," points to how he wants to portray history.
"Like a lot of populists, he works on nostalgia for a golden age," the historian says. "This idea that somebody took your birthright and there's some version of America we need to get back to."
Cowie says the president seems to invoke two different eras as touchstones: the golden age of American manufacturing, when work was stable and wages weren't stagnant, and the 1950s, the pre-Civil Rights era of what Cowie describes as white, patriarchal households.
The approach hints at an essential divide in interpreting the story of the United States: Is America a country striving to return to former glory, or a nation on a continuous arc of self-improvement?
Those visions have always been competing, says Angela Diaz, an associate professor specializing in Civil War history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
A large majority of Americans — for instance, women, people of color, the impoverished — did not, in fact, flourish during the so-called golden eras of the past, Diaz and other historians note.
For many groups, a return to the past would mean "erasing a lot of the legal, economic, political, technological, social progress that the country has made and calling all of that into question," Diaz says.
Diaz also says history should include more stories: "The more voices we have in our history, the fuller it is, the richer it is. And I would say the more accurate it is, in terms of its complexity."
The Organization of American Historians agrees. In its response to Trump's order on American History, it warned that his action "proposes to rewrite history to reflect a glorified narrative that downplays or disappears elements of America's history — slavery, segregation, discrimination, division — while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups."
In some instances, legal challenges have put some of the initiatives on hold for now.
Conservatives applaud Trump's moves
Conservative groups have largely welcomed Trump's push to influence history and culture. That includes the Heritage Foundation, creators of Project 2025, which lays out how the president should combat what it calls "the totalitarian cult known today as 'The Great Awokening.' "
Jonathan Butcher, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow focusing on education, praises Trump's reinstatement of the 1776 Project on U.S. history. The presidential advisory commission's report was released in the final days of Trump's first administration.
It was seen as a counterpoint to the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times. The Pulitzer Prize-winning series' goal was, in its own words, to reframe American history by "placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative."
The 1776 Report lists what the advisory commission described as five "challenges to America's principles": slavery, progressivism, fascism, communism and "racism and identity politics."
"I think that document helps to underlie the executive orders that have come" from the White House, Butcher says.
When the administration looks to prohibit DEI programs in schools, he adds, "it is with the understanding that those particular concepts are based on racial favoritism."
Butcher agrees that there is a tension between two fundamental approaches to history: one focusing on America's ideals, and one focusing on the country's failures to embody them.
"Those two ideas are always going to be in competition in American life," Butcher says. The country's story includes the institution of slavery and the Jim Crow era, he explains, as well as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the notion of God-given individual rights.
In Butcher's view, the history of race in the U.S. has been portrayed recently in inaccurate or problematic ways, citing both The 1619 Project and an influential essay, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" by Peggy McIntosh.
Criticizing those works, Butcher argues that they're based on the "idea that there are burdens that America will either never get around or that systemic racism can't be resolved."
"It doesn't give students the chance to look back in American history and say these were, of course, imperfect people who were trying, in many cases, in key cases, to live up to America's founding ideals," Butcher says. "And I think that that's the message that we need to be giving to the next generation."
Renaming places can unite people — if done correctly
In the U.S., recent pushes to transform how the past is remembered echo another large-scale attempt at revamping history: the Redemption era.
In the decades after the Civil War, white Southerners led a violent counteraction to Reconstruction and sought a return to the old order based on white supremacy. Statues and monuments sprang up to honor the Confederacy. Through at least the 1940s, U.S. military bases were named for Confederate leaders, according to the U.S. Army.
In the 1950s and '60s, as tensions again rose over civil rights in the U.S., so did memorials to the Confederacy.
In the past decade, many monuments and memorials linked to white supremacy made headlines again. This time, they've been targeted for removal or renaming during a national reckoning that grew after shocking events such as the mass shooting that killed nine Black worshipers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
A similar dynamic can be seen in other countries: In times of social and political upheaval, leaders seek to refocus the lens of history.
Political regimes seek "to represent and manipulate landscapes to promote their own ideological and political objectives," says Martha Lungi Kabinde-Machate, who studies language and names at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa.
Changing things like street names, she says, helps politicians focus "on cleansing, restoring, and transforming memory."
Kabinde-Machate has analyzed what happened after the end of apartheid when South Africa renamed geographic markers like streets. The most successful efforts, she says, use eponyms "that unite people rather than names that cause divisions…. These [uniting] names include athletes, poets, scholars, doctors, and musicians."
In some ways, President Trump appears to be following this thinking: Many people to be featured in the "Garden of American Heroes" are from entertainment (Alex Trebek) and sports (Kobe Bryant). But his approach to military forts and historical markers is more divisive.
Trump previously opposed a plan to rename U.S. bases if their namesakes were Confederate figures. And in his second term, Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has restored names such as Fort Benning and Fort Bragg. The Pentagon says those two installations now honor U.S. veterans with the same last names as Confederate officers. But as Hegseth announced the change to the now-former Fort Liberty in North Carolina, he stated, "That's right: Bragg is back."
Such reversions raise a question: The Trump administration's push to remake American history is stirring controversy, but what kind of lasting effects might it have?
"As long as the data is not lost, it seems all reversible," Vanderbilt's Cowie says. "Especially since they're executive orders, which you can immediately reverse with a new regime."
If Trump's intent is to make changes that truly resonate and reflect America, Kabinde-Machate's work suggests that the process should be transparent. The goal, she says, is that "everyone has a chance to participate and express their opinions on the process; the information should be made public."
Copyright 2025 NPR