For approximately two centuries, Black people in what would later become America were enslaved by white owners. Yet you would never know about this long and horrific era of U.S. history if you read the 85-page document about historical heroes that a MAGA-aligned group put out ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary.
Although the document mentions enslaved people who went on to fight for freedom, like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington, the words “slave” and “slavery” each appear once. Racism is not mentioned at all. Instead, their biographies champion these figures as “patriots” with a “can-do” spirit. The document is connected to an art contest for students being put on by the group Freedom 250, an alternative to America 250, the congressionally approved body tasked with organizing celebrations for the country’s semiquincentennial.
The erasure of a significant but dark chapter of history, which comes as America prepares to celebrate not only 250 years of independence but also 161 years since the official end of slavery, may not surprise anyone who has been paying attention to how President Donald Trump has — and hasn’t — addressed Black history since returning to the White House.
Conservatives have long failed to really reckon with America’s racial history, and politicians have often tried to downplay its significance and cover up some of the more appalling parts of the past. But the Trump administration has largely dispensed with the whitewashing and instead has taken to trying to completely rewrite history.
“It’s more than just trying to erase Black history,” said Bryan Stevenson, the co-founder and executive director at the Equal Justice Initiative. “It’s trying to alter American history.”
“The story of slavery is a critically important story to the history of this country. We had a civil war where hundreds of thousands of people were killed. It shaped the constitutional amendments that have been so impactful in the 20th Century,” he said. “And to not be honest about that history just creates a misunderstanding of who we are as a nation.”
On June 19, 1865, the last of the enslaved people in Texas got word that slavery was officially over — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Black communities across the country marked the occasion for more than a hundred years, and Joe Biden declared Juneteenth to be a federal holiday in 2021 in the wake of the racial justice protests that swept the country after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.
But the Trump administration has stalled progress when it comes to honoring Black history, even trying to erase references to it from the country’s public institutions. The president and his allies have never actually said slavery was made up or that racism has never existed, but they don’t have to.
“Instead of catering to the concerted efforts to rewrite American history and adopt left-wing ideology aimed at diminishing American achievement, President Trump is honoring our country’s extraordinary heritage and restoring a sense of national pride,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, told HuffPost in an emailed statement. “The President has put an end to the radical left and the media’s divisive and inaccurate characterization of our nation’s history, which infiltrated our national parks and museums, and is restoring truth and sanity.”
Two months after returning to the White House, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History,” which ordered federal institutions to deemphasize slavery and racism when talking about American history. “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 order says. “Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.”
The executive order specifically targets the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum complex that is home to many museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Trump said in the order that the Smithsonian has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” Later that year, he took to social media to complain about how the Smithsonian only talks about how bad slavery is.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” he said in an August 2025 Truth Social post.
Trump said in his social media post that he was ordering a review of the Smithsonian museums, which includes the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. The museum, which opened in 2016, tells a multifaceted story of Black history and the countless contributions to American culture. But it also covers a comprehensive history of slavery in the U.S.
“It’s egregious to talk about owning another human being, and I don’t know how somebody can spin it in a good light,” said Mariam Rashid, the associate director of racial equality and justice at the Center for American Progress.
As part of its review of the institution, the White House asked the Smithsonian to turn over all materials related to any content the public sees, its processes for deciding how to display exhibits and anything related to its America 250 programming. The storied institution could face budget cuts for failing to comply, Trump said. The Smithsonian, which gets most of its funding from tax dollars, has turned over copious amounts of materials, but it’s unclear what the next steps are.
“If you work with an incomplete past, you aren’t able to shape the future in ways that are based on historical evidence and understanding,” said Sarah Weicksel, the executive director of the American Historical Association.
The federal government has also attempted to remove Black history from public view by taking down exhibits in our national parks, and by using rhetoric that routinely downplays and scoffs at the reality of the nation’s historic horrors.
George Washington, one of the founding fathers, enslaved nine Black people at the President’s House in Philadelphia, where he lived and governed before Washington, D.C., was built. There has long been an exhibit at Independence Hall memorializing the people Washington enslaved, a depiction of the contradiction between espousing liberty for all while holding people in bondage.
But in January, National Parks Service workers removed the exhibit, with a spokesperson saying the agency was abiding by the March 2025 executive order. The city sued the federal government, and a judge ordered the display to be restored. A federal judge then blocked the administration from removing it again while lawsuits make their way through the courts.
“When you remove the accurate information and replace it…with a revisionist history…or just completely ignore a certain population that existed in this country or built this country, you’re doing a disservice to the visitors of those national parks,” Rashid said.
There was a similar incident in West Virginia when National Park employees were reportedly instructed to remove information about slavery abolitionist John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park. At another unnamed park, a photo of the scarred back of a man who escaped slavery in Louisiana was also set to be taken down, according to the Washington Post. The removals were related to Trump’s executive order. (A federal judge ordered the Trump administration last week to reinstall any historical or scientific displays it had removed.)
“If they’re able to seize hold of and create a dominant narrative of U.S. history that excludes many of the people who lived that history, then our students, our museum visitors, our national park visitors, and all Americans will not have access to the entirety of their history,” Weicksel said.
If the Trump administration’s efforts to revise history are even partly successful, we could see a policy shift in the U.S., historians and other experts told HuffPost. Part of writing laws is understanding the historical context of why we need certain legislation in the first place — so if the last 200 years are reframed in a MAGA-friendly light, certain rights could start to go by the wayside.
“You’re not going to be able to actually understand many of the things that come post-1865,” Weicksel said. “You’re not going to understand why there was such unrest in the Reconstruction Era. You’re not going to understand why there was an effort to create the Ku Klux Klan. You’re not going to understand the need for a civil rights movement.”
Trump has repeatedly decried affirmative action in college admissions, a landmark civil rights legislation designed to make progress on racial equality, saying it was an effort to harm white people. “White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college,” he told The New York Times in January. “So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.”
The Trump administration has launched a war on colleges, particularly the Ivy Leagues, claiming elite institutions are admitting Black students over white ones simply because of their race. The administration has attempted to get schools to fall in line by threatening to pull federal funding unless they comply with orders to turn over student demographic data, alter their academic programming to align with Trump’s policy goals, and prioritize admitting white and conservative students.
Trump has also been actively pushing back on a Biden administration project to take down monuments and rename military bases that were named after Confederate soldiers.
After the South lost the Civil War and all the enslaved people were freed, former Confederates and enslavers embarked on an effort to romanticize the pre-emancipation South. It led to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, an ahistorical myth that claimed that slavery was not the main purpose of the Civil War.
That rhetoric took off, and by the early 1900s, monuments of Confederate soldiers went up all around the country, many of which are still up today. “That’s why we’re in the position that we’re in,” Rashid said.
Trump promised to restore the Confederate names to military bases that had been renamed in late 2020 after Congress passed a law banning military bases from being named after insurrectionists. To avoid breaking that law, the Trump administration restored the old Confederate names by finding soldiers and service members with the same last name.
For instance, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, originally named after Confederate general Braxton Bragg, was briefly renamed to Fort Liberty. The U.S. Army announced that it would be reverted to Bragg, this time named after a World War II soldier.
But Trump signaled the real intent during a speech at the base. “Can you believe they changed that name in the last administration for a little bit?” he asked the booing crowd. “Fort Bragg is in. That’s the name. And Fort Bragg it shall always remain. That’s never going to be happening again.”
Resurrecting shrines to the traitorous Confederate soldiers stands in stark contrast to the way other countries have grappled with their pasts.
When Nazi Germany fell, a new government took over, and today all Germans get comprehensive education about the horrors of the Holocaust. When apartheid, government-sanctioned racial segregation, ended in South Africa, the new regime made sure to create a museum that detailed their country’s racist history. The U.S. still has never had such a reckoning.
“I think people in this country have been reluctant to talk about this because the people who benefited from slavery continued to be in power after the Civil War,” Stevenson said. “The people who benefited from terror violence and Jim Crow laws never had to give up power.”
