Trying to erase history is a theme of Donald Trump’s second term.
But his administration’s revisionist moves hit a snag on Monday. That’s when a federal judge ruled that the city of Philadelphia is likely to win its lawsuit against the administration’s attempt to whitewash George Washington’s slave-owning history at the President’s House Site, a location in the city that commemorates the first official presidential residence.
The suit was sparked by the National Park Service’s removal last month of educational panels and accompanying videos that discussed slavery. The city moved for a preliminary injunction to restore the exhibit.
Granting the motion on Presidents Day, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe wrote that the federal government “claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control.” The George W. Bush appointee wrote that those claims “echo Big Brother’s domain in [George] Orwell’s 1984,” specifically the dystopian novel’s government Records Department.
Turning to the present day, Rufe wrote, “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten.” But a government agency “cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it,” she wrote in support of her conclusion that the city will likely win its claims that the removal was “arbitrary and capricious.”
And though Rufe’s preliminary ruling isn’t the final word in the litigation, it’s just one example of the resistance that the administration’s efforts to rewrite history is meeting in the courts.
On Tuesday, a coalition of groups filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts that seeks to require the federal government “to cease all unlawful efforts to remove up-to-date and accurate historical or scientific information from the national parks” and to restore interpretative materials that have been removed.
The suit cited the Philadelphia erasure as among the litany of revisionist moves, writing in Tuesday’s complaint that the government campaign “escalated in recent weeks, as the National Park Service, implementing an order of the Secretary of the Interior, tore down the exhibit in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park memorializing the legacy of people enslaved by the country’s first President; ripped away signage detailing climate threats at Fort Sumter, one of the country’s most environmentally endangered parks; and wiped away descriptions of history and science at countless national parks throughout the United States.”
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