President Donald Trump speaks with reporters and signs executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on Jan. 23. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
William McKinley was one of our greatest presidents, ushering in an era of wealth and power. Manifest Destiny was a noble calling worthy of emulation. Handing over the Panama Canal was a folly and a sign of weakness.
America’s centuries-long embrace of slavery, while regrettable, was less important than the fact that we ended it. And the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was a heroic act of collective patriotism, not a violent effort to overturn an election.
Those are some of the perspectives President Donald Trump has advancedas he moves in the early days of his second presidency to reframe American history, in parallel with his efforts to reshape the government. In recasting established facts, shading long-accepted truths and endorsing falsehoods, Trump is pushing one big idea: that America is a once-great, uniquely virtuous nation whose past has been betrayed by weak leaders and vicious adversaries.
“He badly misunderstands the difference between history and propaganda,” said Kevin Kruse, a history professor at Princeton Universityfrequently critical of Trump. “A history that only praises the nation and offers no criticism, that looks only at the positive aspects, including mythologies — that is not history, that is propaganda.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. But Trump’s supporters argue that he is seeking to correct liberals’ distorted approach to history, which they say emphasizes America’s sins — the embrace of slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans — while ignoring its unique role as a promoter of democracy and freedom.
“To the extent that this is about the distortions in the way American history is taught and efforts to correct those distortions, I think it is wholesome,” said Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, which fights what it sees as ideological bias and cancel culture in education. “And I think this is a debate that is worth having.”
On Wednesday, Trump underlined his intent to steer the discussion of American history by announcing a task force to plan the country’s 250th birthday celebration on July 4, 2026, with himself as chair.
He also reinstated plans to create a “national garden of American heroes” featuring statues of historically significant Americans. Trump issued a similar order near the end of in his first term only to see President Joe Biden rescind it, a reflection of the furious back-and-forth over America’s past.
Trump’s messaging on history was evident from the first minutes of his current term, when he delivered an inaugural address whose centerpiece was a vivid summary of America’s journey.
Americans, Trump said, “crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens, and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand.”
Since then, Trump said, a “radical and corrupt establishment” has pursued “many betrayals.” This treacherous elite, he added, has stolen Americans’ wealth and freedom, coddled criminals and immigrants, and now “teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves.”
“Trump accuses the left of producing a moralizing history. He is not entirely wrong there,” said Lawrence Glickman, who teaches American studies at Cornell University. “But as often with the kind of projection he employs, he is mirroring that himself — it’s just the valence of the good guys and the bad guys has flipped.”
Trump attends an Independence Day event at Mount Rushmore in 2020. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)
Trump’s moves come as the country is engaged in a rare and emotional debate over the meaning and shape of its history.
In 2019, the New York Times published “The 1619 Project,” which located the country’s true founding in the arrival of the first enslaved person ship on its shores that year. “America was not yet America,” the piece said, “but this is the moment it began.”
Trump reacted angrily and created a 1776 Commission, which reasserted that year as the national birthday and issued a report declaring, “Americans will never falter in defending the fundamental truths of human liberty proclaimed on July 4, 1776.”
Biden removed the report from the White House website and dissolved the commission. Trump reinstated it this past week, with a new mandate that includes the provision of “patriotic education” at national parks and monuments.
Trump’s recent comments come against that volatile backdrop. In his inaugural address, for example, Trump cited “ending slavery” as one of America’s great achievements — without noting as well that America accepted slavery for two centuries, with dire effects on African Americans, and was one of the last countries to abolish it after the devastating Civil War.
The president also promised to “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Manifest Destiny was the 19th century idea that God had blessed the conquest of North America by White Americans.
“I and virtually any member of the historical profession cringed at the invoking of manifest destiny as something to which the president aspired,” said John Lawrence, a Ph.D. historian who served as chief of staff to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California).
Trump has long deployed historically loaded phrases, such as his embrace of the term “America First” — the slogan of a movement, often considered antisemitic and fascist-leaning, that opposed U.S. intervention against the Germans in World War II.
To his supporters, the phrases are powerfully expressive; no fair-minded person, they say, would suggest Trump is somehow endorsing their long-abandoned meanings.
“I think that many Americans in hearing those phrases have no recollection or knowledge at all that they were used for different purposes in earlier eras,” Wood said. “So yes, he is repurposing phrases from the past, and historians who know about them may bridle at that. But I don’t think he is misleading contemporary Americans. He is giving these phrases new content.”
But his critics find it reckless for the president to toss around such rhetoric heedless of historical context.
“It’s like he’s looking at the bullets on American history, the titles of chapters on American history, without recognizing the detrimental, the embarrassing, the consequential effects of those periods,” Lawrence said. “To use terms like ‘manifest destiny’ or ‘America First’ is not just indicative of a gross insensitivity, but also a lack of understanding what that terminology means.”
Trump’s most notable foray into history has been his praise for President William McKinley, who served as president from 1897 to 1901. The American Political Science Association last year ranked McKinley 24th out of the 45 presidents. (Critics say APSA is a liberal organization, noting that the same survey ranked Trump last.)
Trump has praised McKinley in recent days for enriching the United States by embracing tariffs, at a time when Trump himself promises sweeping tariffs against the recommendation of many economists. Robert W. Merry, author of “President McKinley: Architect of the American Century,” said the president is right to seize on McKinley’s importance, adding, “I believe that McKinley is a significantly underrated president, as I wrote in the book, so in that sense I kind of agree with Trump.”
But Merry also said the president is ignoring how much the world has changed since McKinley’s day. Among other things, the United States urgently needed revenue at the time because it had no income tax. And unlike McKinley, he said, Trump promotes tariffs largely as a way to punish countries he disagrees with.
“We do know that he wants to use tariffs as kind of a bludgeon to get the desired outcomes from other nations in the world,” Merry said. “And that is certainly not what McKinley did.”
Trump has also seized on more recent history, denouncing on several occasions the 1978 treaties that gave control of the Panama Canal to its home country. “We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made,” Trump said recently, arguing that China has too much influence over the vital waterway.
Stuart E. Eizenstat, who was President Jimmy Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser, said leaders across the political spectrum agreed that it was in America’s interest to hand over the canal, given the growing violence against Americans in the Canal Zone and the difficulty of managing the facility.
“President Carter saw the Treaty as opening a new, more positive era in U.S.-Latin American relations at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, taking away their argument of American imperialism,” Eizenstat wrote in an email.
But Trump’s complaint about the canal fits into his broader assertion that America has routinely suffered “horrible betrayal” by elites, a contention that undergirds many of his biggest promises, from deportations to tariffs. These actions, in his telling, are not acts of aggression against immigrants or foreign countries, but rather ways to correct past wrongs.
That sense of grievance also frames Trump’s clearest effort to rewrite history, regarding an event that involves him directly and happened just four years ago. Trump has long falsely asserted that the 2020 election was stolen, insisting that the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was a legitimate protest by democracy-loving patriots.
Trump has dramatically stepped up those efforts now that he has regained the powers of the presidency. In one of the first acts of his second term, Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 people convicted of crimes in connection with the deadly riot — in one stroke erasing their offenses from the record.
The Trump Justice Department, meanwhile, has removed from its website a database that listed all the convictions of those involved in the assault, according to CNN, another way of deleting the evidence. And House Republicans have created a new committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack, in an apparent effort to undermine the damaging picture painted by the original committee, which was controlled by Democrats.
These efforts have even been seized on by Russian President Vladimir Putin as he justifies his much-criticized invasion of Ukraine. Putin last week echoed Trump’s claim of a stolen election, as well as Trump’s unfounded assertion that the Russia-Ukraine war would not have happened if he had been in office.
“I couldn’t disagree with him that if he had been president, if they hadn’t stolen victory from him in 2020, the crisis that emerged in Ukraine in 2022 could have been avoided,” Putin told Russian television.
And while he seeks to reshape history to fit his agenda, Trump also has his eye on how future historians will see his own role.
“Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history,” Trump said in his inaugural, a dubious assertion to many historians, in part because four presidents were assassinated. He added, “It is my hope that our recent presidential election will be remembered as the greatest and most consequential election in the history of our country.”
Glickman said most presidents hope to be recalled as towering figures, but few are so brazen about it.
“I think he isn’t unique among presidents in valuing being remembered in history as a great figure. Most presidents are more subtle about it,” Glickman said. “That is part of what makes him different, is his explicitness about not just wanting that but declaring himself a world-historical figure.”