Trump’s War on History: How Lies Threaten Our Democracy

Trump isn’t just rewriting the future. He’s erasing the past to control the present.

Yesterday, President Zelensky met Trump and European leaders to underscore a basic truth: facts matter. Russia lies about its war, but the reality is undeniable—Ukraine is holding the line, and the free world is rallying to support it, well, mostly. Facts exist. They always have. Yet here at home, Donald Trump has built his political career on denying that very idea. (Recall his first-term advisor Kellyanne Conway’s infamous phrase: “alternative facts.”) Thanks to scientists, economists, historians, and countless others, we have the data to understand our world—unless, of course, you’re willing to bend reality in the pursuit of power. And if you look closely, you’ll see that this pursuit forms the foundation of Trump’s entire presidency.

Trump first attacked reality through an executive order crafted to please his base, who often prefer a sanitized, fictional version of America’s past. Titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the order required federal institutions to strip “improper, divisive, or anti-American” content from their websites, signs, and exhibits. Who would decide what counted as improper? Trump himself.

In June, he fired the entire State Department Historical Advisory Committee for the offense of acknowledging inconvenient truths in the Department’s story. Soon after, the Smithsonian was pressured with a letter demanding it purge “divisive” or “ideologically driven” language within six months.

The intent is obvious. Like Stalin and other authoritarians, Trump seeks to control history itself, reshaping our memory to suit his personal myth. In Trump’s version, America was never divided over war and peace, or women’s suffrage, or racism. In his telling, our history looks more like the sanitized lessons of an elementary school in the 1950s than the complex, painful, and inspiring reality of our past.

Imagine scrubbing hard truths from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History or its Museum of the American Indian. Racism shaped those experiences, and its impact endures. Yet even children can grasp that our past contains both tragedy and progress—that out of struggle came vibrant culture and strength. Without that honesty, the museums might as well close their doors.

The attack didn’t stop with museums. The National Park Service was ordered to encourage visitors to report displays that reflected “negativity.” Staff at Muir Woods canceled a planned exhibit on racism and women’s contributions to conservation. The Underground Railroad site erased Harriet Tubman from its story. Arlington National Cemetery deleted references to women and Black Americans. The Army and Navy pulled down pages on the history of female service members. The Air Force dropped videos celebrating the Tuskegee Airmen. Even Black History Month was banned from being officially observed at the Pentagon under Secretary Pete Hegseth.

As a retired Air National Guard pilot, I know the military’s record isn’t perfect, but it is proud—especially in leading the way on integration long before the Civil Rights Act. To erase that history is to erase part of America’s strength.

Trump’s goal is simple: free his followers from thinking. By offering a rosy, fictionalized past and contrasting it with a distorted present, he presents himself as the only one who can restore greatness. His “American carnage” inaugural set the theme, and his so-called “patriotic education” commission—stacked with loyalists, not historians—made it official. The commission even recommended comparing the Progressive Era, which gave us child labor laws, food safety, national parks, and women’s suffrage, to fascism and slavery. Teddy Roosevelt, a proud progressive, would be erased from his own legacy.

This effort to rewrite history stretches to Trump’s present-day abuses. He pardoned more than a thousand January 6th rioters, calling them “hostages” who “love their country.” He distorted crime data to justify a federal takeover of D.C.’s police, despite FBI stats showing crime is at a three-decade low. He fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after it reported weak hiring, replacing her with a partisan ally who once cheered outside the Capitol on January 6.

Piece by piece, Trump is trying to replace facts with fantasy—history with propaganda. The danger is not just what it erases, but what it teaches: that truth is negotiable, and loyalty to one man matters more than loyalty to country.

Historians, academics, and the press are sounding the alarm. But as we saw in DC yesterday—where democratic nations rallied together on the basis of hard facts and shared truth—the stakes are bigger than partisan squabbles. Authoritarians survive on lies. Democracies survive on truth.

The question now is whether America will choose to remember its history honestly—or let one man rewrite it to serve his power.