Tampering with History and the Environment

Trump Rewrites History and Ignores Its Lessons

There are two famous quotes about history often attributed to Winston Churchill:

• “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is one. The other?
• “History is written by the victors” is the other.

In point of fact, Churchill wasn’t the original source of either. But those two sentiments are a useful way to look at the fight over American history currently being waged by the White House against the Smithsonian Institution and other public spaces that seek to educate the people about their country’s past.

A 162-page report by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council titled “Saving America’s Story” and posted on the Fourth of July, claimed that:

“To the extent that there is a story told at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, it is not one of ‘the victory of freedom and genius of our country’ but one of regret, tragedy and shame.”

The report states that the museum has been the victim of “ideological capture” and “extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.” In particular, it claims the institution is guilty of a strong anti-white bias. “In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.”

When I look at that list of subjects, what I see are the lessons of history that we must learn from or be doomed to repeat. What Trump sees is history being written not by the victors, but by the losers. “Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” How, exactly, does an accounting of past flaws discourage anyone, unless they are hoping to repeat them for personal profit moving forward? What Trump’s White House is really saying is, we are the victors, and we plan to be the ones to write our history as a self-glorifying fairy tale of moral rectitude and inevitable triumph.

According to a report in The Guardian, the Trump administration has also spent the past year and a half systematically removing historical signs, exhibits, and educational materials from U.S. national parks, targeting content about slavery, Native American history, the Civil Rights Movement, and climate change. Following a presidential executive order to restore “truth and sanity to American history,” National Park Service staff were directed to flag any content deemed to “inappropriately disparage” Americans or be “unrelated to the beauty, abundance and grandeur of the American landscape.”

A leaked database of nearly 2,000 flagged items revealed the broad scope of the review. An official court-ordered inventory confirmed at least 60 signs were removed across 38 parks. In June 2026, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley issued a 63-page injunction blocking further removals and ordering all removed signs to be restored, writing that the administration was “telling half-truths” and setting “a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.” The Trump administration appealed the decision the day after it was filed, and the case remains in legal limbo.

Apparently, the administration sees the massacre of at least 173 Piegan Blackfeet tribe members at Grand Teton as nothing more than a distraction from the park’s natural grandeur. Ditto the names of the enslaved cave guides who carved their names into the walls of Mammoth Cave 300 feet underground, which an executive order erased. The NPS did not formally include slavery as a cause of the Civil War in its park materials until the 1990s. After that, it took another generation to add monuments for Japanese American internees and civil rights figures. Adding accurate history to public parks is slow, difficult work. Tearing it out is quick. According to a Center for American Progress analysis, Black history was the most targeted category across 171 National Park sites, flagged at 82 of them.

The “beauty and grandeur” standard seems to describe a very specific type of beauty. It’s the type the victors see when they look in the mirror, when they look at their mansions, when they add up the numbers in their bank accounts and stock portfolios. They aren’t interested in history they can learn from, and they aren’t worried about repeating past mistakes. If they take the family to the Smithsonian or a national park, they just want to be sure their children or grandchildren won’t be faced with the kinds of ugly truths they’ve worked their whole lives trying to bury.

Also:

“Trump Pardons Polluters and a Major Donor”

Last week, Donald Trump pardoned eleven people, including nine who were convicted of Clean Air Act violations, as well as a longtime Republican donor who hosted a big money fundraiser at the President’s Mar-a-Lago club in March. The nine emissions-related recipients were convicted for crimes involving “defeat devices,” which are used to disable or bypass EPA-approved emissions control systems on vehicles.

Trump announced the pardons on Truth [sic] Social, saying those pardoned had been “persecuted by the Biden Administration” and were “in, or being sent to, prison, for ‘fixing their car.’” But if you look at the facts, that’s kind of like saying a bank robber was sent to prison for making a cash withdrawal. One of the people Trump pardoned, Jonathan Achtemeier, tampered with monitoring devices on hundreds of commercial trucks across the country so their pollution violations would not be detected. He advertised his services on the internet and grossed $4.3 million between 2019 and 2021. “Fixing their car” indeed.

Trump chose that language deliberately. Shrink a commercial emissions tampering operation down to the image of some guy with his head under the hood of a Chevy on a Saturday afternoon, and you’ve won the argument before anyone bothers to read the court documents. The EPA’s own data tells a different story: known defeat-device sales for diesel trucks between 2009 and 2020 allowed more than 570,000 tons of excess nitrogen oxides to be released into the environment. Because, after all, it’s just the air we breathe. Who cares?

Trump’s pardons followed a memo he signed earlier in the week directing the EPA to allow Americans to modify their vehicles as they see fit, and a Justice Department order earlier in the year to drop all pending prosecutions related to defeat devices. That’s three different presidential actions working in tandem to tell you exactly what this administration values, and it turns out it’s not “the beauty, abundance and grandeur of the American landscape.” So, while Jonathan Achtemeier makes more than $4 million, “the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day.”