Trump rewrites – As President Donald Trump marks the 250th anniversary of the United States with rallies and boasts of American greatness, his administration has also moved to reshape how parts of U.S. history are presented—sparking conflict over a slavery exhibit at George Wa
On Washington. D.C.’s National Mall. President Donald Trump sold the Fourth of July as a kind of national crescendo: the “most unforgettable birthday party any country has ever seen.” He called the United States the “greatest. strongest. and most exceptional nation the world has ever known. ” adding that it was “superior to any nation that’s ever been built no matter how many years it took.”.
But the celebratory language has not matched the country’s documented history, according to an account that tracks what many Americans would rather set aside—especially as Trump, shortly after taking office last year, moved to whitewash how U.S. history is taught and displayed.
The friction became especially visible in Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. where George Washington and Martha Washington lived in the 1790s—when the city was briefly the nation’s capital—and where the President’s House site includes context about Washington’s ownership of enslaved people. In January 2026. crowbar-wielding workmen descended on the site. and the Trump administration ordered panels discussing ownership of people by Washington and details about enslaved men and women. along with broader history of slavery. to be pried off. A federal appeals court later discarded an injunction ordering the National Park Service to restore the site. allowing the Trump administration to replace the slavery exhibit.
The Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which led the movement to craft the original display, said the change was “an attempt to sanitize history and present a version of the past that is more comfortable, but far less truthful.”
That battle over one display is part of a wider push to control national memory. Last March. an executive order took aim at a supposed “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” that it said is intended to “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” The writer’s counter is blunt: Trump. in their view. is the one rewriting history to fit the claims of greatness he makes at the podium.
The argument rests on a series of episodes the piece presents as inconvenient truths—events spanning centuries. from colonial violence to later systems of state abuse. In 1779. the writer points to an order from Washington for a scorched-earth campaign against native peoples. aimed at the “total ruin” of the so-called Six Nations across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania and New York. Washington told Maj. Gen. John Sullivan that the “immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements. ” and Sullivan’s army destroyed more than 40 villages after the operation.
In Colorado, the piece recounts Col. John Chivington. head of the Colorado military district. leading more than 700 troops to attack Cheyenne and Arapaho groups at dawn on November 29. 1864. At Sand Creek. Chivington’s men. described as unleashing gunfire and artillery on a sleeping village. slaughtered the camp’s inhabitants for almost four hours. with two-thirds of them women and children. It says many Native women were also raped, and that Native American scalps, breasts, and genitalia were taken as souvenirs. In a letter to Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis, Chivington wrote: “It may, perhaps, be unnecessary for me to state that I captured no prisoners. Between five and six hundred Indians were left dead upon the field.”.
Another example comes from 1914, when striking miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were celebrating Greek Easter. The piece says the Colorado National Guard and a private security company opened fire on the miners’ camp with a machine-gun-equipped armored car known to the miners as “the Death Special.” It says the miners fought the National Guard for 10 days before President Woodrow Wilson ordered in federal troops. and that almost 200 people were killed. according to some estimates.
The writer then turns to Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district in 1921. The piece says a two-day attack by white mobs began after Black Tulsans attempted to prevent a man’s lynching. It describes rioting white people killing hundreds and destroying more than 30 city blocks. including a community known as Black Wall Street. It cites Viola Ford Fletcher. a survivor. recalling piles of bodies in the streets and watching a white man execute a Black man and then shoot at her family.
The document the writer puts forward also includes claims about coerced and forced sterilization. It says that controlling “undesirable” populations—disabled people. immigrants. people of color. the poor. unmarried mothers. those with mental illness. and others—was used as a method over the decades. It says federally funded sterilization programs operated in 32 states. and that over 70 years in California. approximately 20. 000 men and women were sterilized in state institutions. often without their full consent.
In Alabama. the piece says that from 1932 to 1972. 399 black men. many of them sharecroppers and poor. were denied treatment for syphilis and deceived by doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service as part of the Tuskegee syphilis study. It says 128 of the men are estimated to have died from syphilis and related complications. despite penicillin availability beginning in the 1940s.
The piece also describes intentionally infected people in Guatemala in the 1940s. It says U.S. government and Guatemalan doctors intentionally infected more than 1. 300 Guatemalan soldiers. prisoners. hospital patients. and sex workers with three sexually-transmitted infections—chancroid. gonorrhea. and syphilis—to study potential treatments. and that researchers also paid sex workers to transmit the diseases. It adds that all three can be fatal if left untreated.
From there, the writer describes radiation experiments on Americans from 1944 to 1974, including the injection of plutonium into people’s bodies, marching troops into the wake of a nuclear explosion, and releasing radioactive substances into the air to track movement or effects.
The account then shifts to war crimes and mass violence during and after World War II. It says U.S. troops from the “Greatest Generation” committed tens if not hundreds of thousands of rapes in Europe during and after the war. and that around 190. 000 German women alone were raped between the U.S invasion of Nazi Germany and 1955. when West Germany regained its sovereignty. according to one estimate. It cites reports compiled by Bavarian priests in the summer of 1945. saying the youngest victim was a 7-year-old child and the oldest was a woman in her 60s.
It also highlights the August 6. 1945 nuclear attack on Hiroshima. describing around 70. 000 people—nearly all civilians—vaporized. crushed. burned. or irradiated to death almost immediately. and another 50. 000 probably dying soon after. It says as many as 280. 000 were dead by the end of the year. many from radiation sickness. and that an atomic strike on Nagasaki three days later is thought to have killed as many as 70. 000.
The writer also points to the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. It says COINTELPRO targeted the civil rights movement. the New Left. and anti-Vietnam War protesters in the 1960s and 1970s. and that a 1976 Senate report said it “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.” It adds that the committee found the FBI went “beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and individuals. ” using “wartime counterintelligence” techniques that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity. ” which they were not.
In South Vietnam, the account returns to March 15, 1968 and the My Lai massacre. It says U.S. troops were briefed by their commanding officer, Capt. Ernest Medina, and that Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the village,’” according to a unit member’s recollection. The piece says the troops encountered only civilians—women. children. and old men—but the order was carried out. with more than 500 civilians slaughtered over four hours. It says soldiers took a break to eat lunch amid the carnage. and that along the way they raped women and young girls. mutilated the dead. and systematically burned homes.
Taken together. the writer argues the nation cannot treat these episodes as footnotes while presenting history as a simple triumph narrative. They say Trump’s claims of “historical milestones” and “advancing liberty. individual rights. and human happiness. ” drawn from the executive order. clash with what they call a long record of violence.
Even as Trump celebrated the 250th anniversary. the writer points to what they describe as a modern pattern: “In the five-plus years Trump has been in the White House. alone. ” the piece says. the U.S. has been embroiled in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars. It also says Black women and men were murdered in cavalier fashion and that anti-ICE protesters were gunned down in the streets. It says immigrants have been deported to foreign prisons. war zones. and human rights-violating pariah states. and that rights “disappeared as if they were panels detailing historical truths.”.
The writer then closes by returning to Trump’s own words—particularly a line that “There has never been anything like the United States of America.” They say it’s “lucky for the world. ” because. for every landing at Normandy. they argue there was a massacre at Bear River or Sand Creek or Samar or No Gun Ri or My Lai or Le Bac.
The piece connects the dispute over historical exhibits to a broader debate about what the country chooses to face. It ends on a passage attributed to Thomas Jefferson in a 1787 letter. in which Jefferson asked. “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” and wrote that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”.
After 250 years, the writer says the country’s choice is whether it will confront its crimes or try to disappear them. Even if, they argue, redemption is unlikely, they say rebirth is possible—if the nation finds a way to read its history without removing the parts that make it hard to celebrate.
Trump Fourth of July National Mall executive order rewriting history George Washington slavery exhibit Philadelphia National Park Service Avenging the Ancestors Coalition Sand Creek Tulsa Greenwood Tuskegee syphilis study COINTELPRO My Lai Hiroshima Nagasaki