What, to the American People, is the Semiquincentennial?

Douglass’s cautionary question of what will become of Centennial-era Americans of color haunts the Semiquincentennial American present, overwrought by the Trump Administration’s historical revision. For in advance of the 250^th, Trump’s Executive Order 14253: Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History blatantly targets the truth of racially-complex national narratives, and especially the brutal 250-year enslavement of African people. For the Order’s first example of Democrats’ “historical ‘insanity” and “lies” is their “corrosive ideology” of race at “Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” the very seat of the semiquincentennial. The Order, which authorizes the Department of the Interior to institute changes at National Park Service sites and in the Smithsonian Institutions (among other locations) targets what it calls Democrats’ “widespread effort to rewrite history” in a way that “deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.” The Order maintains that previous administrations have advanced “historical revision” that rewrite the “Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Given the Order’s cognitive-dissonance-inducing distortion of historical reality, the American Historical Association and a number of notably signatories immediately responded with condemnation.

Yet, despite historians’ criticism and the wide protest of Philadelphians, the Trump Administration targeted the President’s House in Philadelphia by removing a series of panels telling the stories of nine individuals enslaved by George and Martha Washington and forced to labor at their residence. Although a lower court first ordered the panels’ restoration, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the previous ruling, which allows the Administration to again remove and replace them with the narrative they would prefer to tell. Given both the centrality of Philadelphia to the nation’s celebration of its 250^th year and the Administration’s active erasure of narratives acknowledging the nation’s profound legacy of slavery and anti-Black racism, it is impossible not to channel Douglass and ask: where has “making America great again” left people of color?

While Executive Order 14253 charges that previous Administrations rewrote American history by “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” it is the Trump Administration who hired conservative activist organization Prager U (headed by right-wing radio host Dennis Prager) and Michigan’s Hillsdale College (a Christian institution on the advisory board for Project 2025) to develop a nationalized historical narrative for the Semiquincentennial. These partisan groups developed the content for both the Administration’s “Freedom Truck” museums (a conceptual homage to the 1976 Bicentennial’s Freedom Train) and the Freedom 250 website “Founders Museum.” Even a cursory glance at a Freedom Truck reveals a sweeping romance of Divine Providence, akin to that told by George Bancroft, nineteenth-century master historian of the United States. Just as Bancroft framed the American Revolution (in his fourth of five volumes on the event) as a “change which Divine wisdom ordained…as certain as the decrees of eternity,” and “which no human policy or force could hold back,” so does the Freedom Truck narrative boldly reclaim the nation as one of Providential design. As patrons—or patriots, as the truck’s exterior “Welcome, Patriots!” rebrands visitors—enter the “museum,” the ceiling boldly avers “In God we Trust,” a full panel centralizes John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” (which envisions America as “a model for the world through faithfulness to God” as the nation’s “earliest identity and vision”), and an AI George Washington proclaims to each visitor that “our rights are a gift from God.”