WASHINGTON DC, United States — The National Museum of African American History and Culture features a lunch counter exhibit commemorating the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, where African American students protested segregation at Woolworth's. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein.

By attempting to dictate a narrative for the history of the United States, the Trump administration is in danger of desecrating the landmarks and monuments that make up its national identity.

On 27 March 2025, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14253, ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’, which is intended to counter the Biden administration’s alleged efforts ‘to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.’ 

Tour guides at Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed, were instructed, according to Trump, to convey the fact that ‘America is purportedly racist.’ The Smithsonian, the country’s most eminent and respected institution dedicated to the history of the United States, had allegedly ‘come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.’ National historical sites, under the auspices of the National Park Service, were perpetuating ‘a false reconstruction of American history.’ 

Executive Order 14253 was designed to right these wrongs and ‘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.’ Executive Order 14253 followed a related presidential decree that re-established the name Mount McKinley for the highest peak in North America and redesignated the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. A third executive order established a committee ‘to provide a grand celebration’ in 2026 marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

President Trump’s assertion of executive authority onto America’s commemorative and toponymic landscapes has been met with a mixture of dismay and defiance in the media. Leading news agencies continued, in defiance of Trump’s executive orders, to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in their reporting. The American Historical Association baulked at a president dictating a narrative of the country’s history. ‘Our goal is neither criticism nor celebration,’ this preeminent organisation of historians informed Trump in a public statement, ‘it is to understand – to increase our knowledge of – the past in ways that can help Americans to shape the future.’

President Trump’s putative power to dictate the work of historians, curators and park guides is embedded in Article II of the US Constitution that ‘invests’ the president with ‘executive Power’ with an explicit mandate: ‘he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’ For the past 250 years, this executive power has generally been used to do just that – to guide policy, not to make it. The first ever executive order, issued by George Washington, instructed government officials ‘to impress [Washington] with a full, precise, and distinct general idea of the affairs of the United States.’ In brief, an enjoinder to government officials that they do their jobs and do them well. 

Certainly, the most famous executive order was issued by Abraham Lincoln, on 1 January 1863, as an ‘Emancipation Proclamation’, freeing enslaved persons in the confederate states, but this executive order did not become national policy until 1865, when Congress passed the 13th Amendment. According to Professor Russell Riley, Co-Chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia, presidents have generally reserved executive power to shape the broad parameters of policy rather than insisting on specifics or ‘getting down into the weeds.’ Even less so when it comes to history. ‘I think it’s safe to say that presidents have not routinely made historical subject matter a topic of their activity,’ Riley says. ‘The most precious asset in Washington is the president’s time, and there typically are too many other demands on it to waste it on esoteric matters of history.’

The actual impact of Trump’s recent executive orders has yet to be seen. The morning after Trump issued Executive Order 14253, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie Bunch III, issued a memorandum to the Smithsonian staff. ‘For more than 175 years, the Smithsonian has been an educational institution devoted to continuous learning with the public in mind,’ Bunch wrote. ‘We remain committed to telling the multi-faceted stories of this country’s extraordinary heritage.’ Bunch was more adamant in a ‘town hall’ meeting with his staff, vowing to uphold the Smithsonian’s mission and values. 

Bunch may well win this battle. While Trump has assigned Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, to oversee the implementation of his museum purge, the 17-member board is presided over by Chief Justice Roberts of the US Supreme Court, who recently chastised Trump in a rare public rebuke of a sitting president by a chief justice about presidential overreach. Further, the Smithsonian board is intentionally designed to be bipartisan as a guardrail against this sort of intrusion on its mission. 

The National Park Service has fewer guardrails or lines of defence since it is part of the Department of the Interior, whose secretary is appointed by the president. The most immediate and public response to Executive Order 14253 was the removal of a profile of Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and social activist, from the National Park Service website. The Tubman profile was quickly restored after public outcry though in somewhat amended form with an image of a US postal stamp bearing her image rather than a photograph. In fact, Tubman had not been removed on instruction from the White House, but rather by an overzealous public employee responding to the executive order, an action with unsettling resonances with one of the key lessons from On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder: ‘Do not obey in advance.’ 

Mostly though, the main result of Executive Order 14253 has been confusion and chaos within the Park Service. Five out of seven regional directors have left their positions. There is currently no director, nor even a designated successor. Executive Order 14253 calls for the reinstatement of ‘the preexisting monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties,’ and to assure that they ‘do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).’ The order does not clarify what qualifies as ‘appropriate disparagement’ of America’s heroes.