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Trump Doesn't Just Want to Rewrite History, He Wants to Erase It. [1]

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Date: 2025-05-29

History, done right, is not always — in fact, not often — kind to its subjects. Modern historians try to gather the best evidence and draw the most objective and rational conclusions without concern for how they will be received politically or emotionally. This does not sit will someone like Trump, who wants to control what historians do in order not just to control the world’s image of himself today but also to dictate how he will be remembered after we are finally free of him.

That means not just controlling historians, but destroying them.

This happened over a month ago (April 30), but we’re just learning about it now:

These historians oversee unbiased accounts of U.S. foreign policy. Trump fired them all.

An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the record of America’s history — especially classified and covert actions — remains unbiased, transparent and thorough. These advisers help oversee the exhaustive publication series called the Foreign Relations of the United States — or the FRUS, as insiders call it — and lawmakers rely on it daily. It is available to the public in major libraries and online.

Trump fired them. All of them. It’s possible they were just on a list of committees and agencies that someone thought weren’t necessary, and Trump just shrugged and said, “sure.” (It wasn’t for cost-saving; committee members meet four times a year and get paid $250.00 for each meeting.) But even if so, it is part of Trump’s scheme to erase our collective memory and replace it with anything and everything that glorifies HIM and only HIM. And there is no report that he is even moving toward appointing their replacements.

Trump is also going after any historical record that contradicts, challenges, or even murmurs about, his racist fantasies. Historian Ibram X. Kendi wrote a guest op-ed in today’s NYT: Trump’s Attacks on Black History Betray America.

Right now the Trump administration has been systematically attacking Black history. It’s set about purging Black historical content from government websites and social media accounts (only restoring a few items after being called out), removing Black history books from libraries, eliminating Black history observances, butchering the reputations of historians and starving libraries, museums, universities and historical institutions of funding. . . . President Trump's raid on the Black historical record is a raid on the opportunity for all Americans to know the endurance of racial inequity and injustice are consequences of the enduring history of anti-Black racist policy and violence, not what’s wrong with Black people as a group.

Trump particularly, desperately, wants to erase the history of his loss to Joe Biden in 2020. It’s not just the January 6, 2021 assault on our democracy; it’s his current demand that candidates for jobs in his administration agree that he won. Trump team tests job candidates by asking who won the 2020 election.

With Trump, all politics is personal, but this is especially and egregiously so: he is so obsessed with being seen as a winner and always and only as a winner that he demands that history call him this and never ever anything else.

We’ve lived through this before — as history reminds us. For hundreds of years, the Catholic church dictated what Europeans could know about history as recorded in the Bible (skipping over the parts it didn’t like), but following the reformation and the Enlightenment, historians starting in nineteenth-century Germany began to look at the Bible, and at religious history generally, ignoring both Catholic and Protestant complaints about what they were finding. (Religious reactionaries have tried to suppress objective religious history in American schools, and are backing Trump because he is helping them.)

Another lesson from history is Santayana’s observation that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This too is a lesson Trump wants us to forget, so that he can repeat the fascist past, the racist past, the autocratic past.

Winston Churchill liked to say that “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” History begs to differ. Ultimately, Trump too will fail, though unlike Winston, he will do great damage in the meantime.

(I am the author of a history of western religion: A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World.)

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