On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump began his second presidency.
What followed wasn’t a single decision or a single headline. It was a governing method: use executive authority, budgets, and bureaucratic compliance to choke the institutions that preserve memory—then call the silence “unity.”
If you want the “real story,” it’s this: the fight is not only over policy. It’s over narrative. Who gets to be remembered, how the nation explains itself, and whether the public is allowed to see the full American record—slavery, resistance, Jim Crow, civil rights, and the ongoing struggle—as central, not optional.
Step One: Cut the language out of government
On Day One, the administration issued Executive Order 14151, directing the termination of federal DEI/DEIA programs and related activities across executive agencies.
This wasn’t just a staffing change. It became a content change—a signal to scrub websites, trainings, internal programming, and public-facing materials that acknowledge race-based inequity.
Then came a companion directive framing “merit” as the justification for rolling back long-standing equity frameworks, including revoking Executive Order 11246 (a cornerstone of federal contractor equal employment requirements).
Step Two: Put museums and parks under ideological review
In March 2025, Trump signed “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” (E.O. 14253)—an order aimed at federal sites “dedicated to history,” including museums and national parks, demanding removal of what the administration calls “divisive” or “improper ideology.”
This matters because the order did something chilling: it treated honest public history—especially history involving racism, slavery, gender exclusion, and state violence—as a contaminant.
Congress’s own research service flagged concerns about how E.O. 14253 could affect Smithsonian exhibits, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Step Three: Make examples—remove exhibits, pull books, pressure institutions
You can see the pattern in what happened next:
• Slavery interpretation removed from a flagship national historic site.
In January 2026, the National Park Service dismantled slavery-related displays at the President’s House site in Philadelphia—panels telling the stories of people enslaved by George Washington. Philadelphia filed suit after the removal.
• National parks “honor” got edited—symbolically.
The NPS removed MLK Day and Juneteenth from its 2026 fee-free days while adding Flag Day/Trump’s birthday, drawing national backlash. (Juneteenth remains a federal holiday by law; this is about public signaling and access, not statutory repeal.)
• Military education and federal institutions saw “DEI purges.”
The U.S. Naval Academy removed hundreds of books, including works tied to civil rights and Black history (e.g., Maya Angelou’s memoir), under directives connected to the anti-DEI push.
• Museums began covering or reconsidering displays.
At the National Cryptologic Museum, exhibits honoring women and people of color were literally covered, then later acknowledged as a “mistake” after outcry—an emblem of how the policy climate pressured institutions into preemptive erasure.
• Smithsonian pressure became formal and ongoing.
The White House sent letters demanding Smithsonian reviews and responses under the executive order framework, tying expectations to compliance.
Step Four: The “Project 2025” blueprint becomes governing practice
“Project 2025” is best understood as a transition and governance blueprint—a detailed plan to restructure the executive branch, personnel, and enforcement priorities. The Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” is its central document.
You don’t have to agree on the label to recognize the overlap: civil rights groups and legal organizations have argued the agenda would weaken civil rights enforcement and dismantle equity infrastructure.
And courts have already been asked to intervene—one federal judge, for example, blocked aspects of the administration’s anti-DEI orders in 2025 on constitutional grounds.
What this adds up to
This isn’t “debate about history.” This is state power shaping what the public is allowed to learn in state-managed spaces.
When a slavery exhibit is removed at a national historical park, that’s not academic disagreement—it’s a decision about what the nation wants visitors to forget.
When MLK Day and Juneteenth are dropped from symbolic public access programs, it’s not a clerical update—it’s a message about which stories deserve national honor.
When museums are warned that funding hinges on ideological compliance, it’s not “neutrality.” It’s leverage.
The hardest truth
A country doesn’t have to burn books to erase people. It only has to defund, delist, deprogram, and de-platform—quietly—until the next generation grows up thinking the missing chapters never existed.
And that is why communities, churches, educators, veterans, and local papers matter: because when official America tries to shrink the story, the people have to expand it.
This happened before. The eraser of Native American History and the eraser of African American History. You see what happens is the majority targets and writes stories known as to most as “The Print Lynchings” . These are when anypne of color starts to have success or previede power, the marketing campaign to target them becomes unleashed wthrough multiple fronts.
