Trump's history war
David Blight urges direct debate
Historian David Blight: “We have to invite the authors of such executive orders to debate us, because I think we can win those debates if they're done in some kind of fair environment.”
David Blight, former president of the Organization of American Historians, has brought something new to the boisterous national discussion of President Trump’s remarkably named executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In a 7-minute May 1 interview on PBS’s News Hour, he challenged the president and the administration to debate it:
[T]hey [have] effectively declared war on our profession, whether that's curators at the Smithsonian, or historians in universities, or the interpreters at a historic site. So, if this is a political, cultural war upon how history is told and written and exhibited, then we have to, with our meager sources, fight back. We have to get out into the public. We have to probably get into right-wing media and make the case. We have to invite the authors of such executive orders to debate us, because I think we can win those debates if they're done in some kind of fair environment.
Not that Professor Blight—Pulitzer-holding Frederick Douglass biographer, Yale University Sterling Professor of American History, and director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition—doesn’t know the present debate environment.
Consider: Oklahoma state school superintendent Ryan Walters has mandated high school history standards promoting misinformation about the 2020 presidential election. Among those advising him is Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025. Walters declares that because the “left has been pushing left-wing indoctrination in the classroom,” Oklahoma is “moving it back to actually understanding history.” Compare that to Mr. Trump’s executive order’s truth-and-sanity title—and to the order’s opening paragraph:
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. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.
Fair debate environment? You can bet that Walters and supporters of the president’s executive order would charge the Associated Press with the logical fallacy of begging the question in the very headline of its article “New standards for Oklahoma high school students promote misinformation about the 2020 election.” I don’t mean beg the question as raise the question. I mean the phrase’s longstanding meaning of presuming as true what has not been proven. In this case, wouldn’t ardent Trump defenders simply insist, yet again, and falsely again, that no one has proven their 2020 rigged-election arguments to be misinformation?
Would it matter in Trumpworld that nothing within the realm of fact could overlook the repeated, unambiguous disproofs of those arguments? No. That’s why Professor Blight inserted the if clause here: “I think we can win those debates if they're done in some kind of fair environment.”
Just as the Rosetta Stone led scholars to unlock Egyptian hieroglyphics, the question implicit in Walters’s Oklahoma question-begging stunt unlocks this political era: Who won the 2020 election? Any answer or evasion is revealing. Try it on any election denier.
Nevertheless reasonable voices can differ on a general public-history issue that came up in the News Hour’s parallel but opposite May 2 interview, “Conservative offers perspective on Trump’s effort to exert authority over history and art.” Christopher Scalia, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, defended the right to choose “what elements of the past to focus on.” On that principle, and while avoiding the president’s inflammatory language, he said “I think that the president has a point. The point isn't that historians can't revise how we understand America's past, but really the point is to push back against this movement in museums and elsewhere that focuses on the shortcomings, flaws and mistakes of America and its past.”
“Certainly, there are some” such shortcomings, flaws and mistakes, he stipulated, “But I think the president is trying to get museums and educators to focus—not ignore those, but to focus on the virtues and greatness of the United States.” Note that he avoided characterizing the shortcomings, flaws and mistakes of a quarter millennium of British North American, and later U.S., slavery as what they were: crimes against humanity.
Mr. Scalia also called it “a good idea to really put the emphasis on celebrating America's history, including new discoveries historians have made through new methods.” It was only a short TV interview, so maybe it’s not fair to note that that bypasses another foundation of healthy revisionism: evolving moral awareness. I suspect that he would approve this Substack newsletter’s constantly repeated outlook statement: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing slavery escapees. Just not yet.”
But elsewhere in Trumpworld, wouldn’t that stir objections, given that it’s predicated on what amounts to systemic racism, a concept that’s thoughtcrime there? That is, it’s predicated on the view that even in 2025, there still remains white-saviorist disregard for the Black self-agency that historians increasingly credit as central to emancipation’s wartime political evolution—as central to the war’s evolution into a struggle for both Union and freedom.
If Professor Blight should somehow happen to get a debate conducted “in some kind of fair environment,” I’d like to hear about that from all sides.