The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Authoritarianism cannot exist with free thought. It must dominate the societal discourse and prevent debate. That means it must also dictate history. The Nazis knew this. In April 1933, two months after Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda chief, proclaimed that “the year 1789” would be “expunged from history”—meaning that the animating ideas of the French Revolution, such as liberty, civic equality, and human rights, were to be crushed.
Germany, under Hitler’s rule, was to be tied in narrative to a millennium that skipped recent European history and stretched back to the Viking era and the earlier Greek and Roman empires.
The Soviets routinely photoshopped out-of-favor officials from official accounts, literally erasing inconvenient history. George Orwell, naturally, put it well in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
There’s much spewing out of Donald Trump’s firehose of chaos and destruction these days: his war on government, the rule of law, and decency; his reckless tariffs that threaten the economy here and abroad; his revenge-a-thon attacks on universities and law firms; his annihilation of the public health and biomedical research communities; his assault on American allies; and his effort to end the Russia-Ukraine war in Vladimir Putin’s favor.
These all have dire and concrete consequences. Trump’s demolition of USAID certainly led to more deaths in Myanmar following the tragic earthquake, given that in previous years this agency would have been on the ground offering assistance within days of the disaster.
Yet we also need to pay heed to Trump’s more abstract efforts, such as his war on culture and history.
Late last month, Trump signed an executive order falsely titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The document declared:
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.
This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.
Trump was referring to long-standing attempts to explore the dark veins of American history—racism, sexism, genocide, and other nasty business—that have been crucial components of the national story.
He called for a sole focus on the nation’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” and assailed this wider perspective for deepening “societal divides” and fostering “a sense of national shame.”
