On March 27, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” As a professional historian and classroom educator with over 15 years of experience, I read this document with a growing sense of alarm—and then outrage. It is a chilling and intellectually dishonest attempt to co-opt the teaching of American history in the service of a rigid, ideologically driven narrative. It deserves not quiet dismissal but forceful rejection.
Let us begin with the title. The phrase “restoring truth and sanity” suggests that truth has been lost and replaced by madness. According to Trump, today’s classrooms are overrun by “Marxist radicals,” “anti-American zealots,” and “divisive narratives designed to make students hate their own country.” However, history educators across this country are working tirelessly to present young people with complex, evidence-based narratives that reflect the American experiment’s ideals and failures.
To portray this effort as “insane” is not merely insulting—it’s dangerous. What Trump calls “truth” is, in fact, a carefully curated myth. What he calls “sanity” is an attempt to suppress the messiness of historical reality in favor of a sanitized fable.
“Federal funding will be contingent upon implementing curriculum that promotes American pride, unity, and moral clarity,” the order states. This is not a neutral educational policy—it is political orthodoxy by fiat. The phrase “moral clarity,” like much of the document, is vague enough to sound noble but broad enough to criminalize dissent. Are we to believe that honest engagement with America’s failures constitutes immorality?
At its core, the executive order demands that K–12 and university-level American history curricula “prioritize patriotism,” “celebrate American greatness,” and “reject ideologies that undermine national unity.” What it does not do is define “patriotism,” explain who decides what qualifies as “greatness,” or clarify which “ideologies” are to be cast aside. This is not education—it is indoctrination.
History, by its nature, is not always flattering. It is the study of human choices, institutions, and consequences. A proper understanding of American history requires confronting slavery, settler colonialism, systemic racism, labor exploitation, and imperialist ventures abroad—not because we hate America, but because we love it enough to tell the truth.
Let us be specific. The U.S. Constitution—often invoked in these debates as a sacred document—explicitly protected slavery. Article I, Section 2 counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for representation purposes. Article I, Section 9, delayed any ban on the transatlantic slave trade until 1808. Article IV, Section 2 required that escaped enslaved persons be returned to their enslavers. This is not some radical interpretation—it is the plain text of the founding document.
To teach this is not to revise American history. It is American history.
Trump’s executive order demands an educational system that flatters rather than informs. It calls for promoting “heroic narratives” and “morally uplifting stories,” as if history were a Hallmark special rather than a rigorous academic discipline. It uses phrases like “the sacred legacy of our Founding Fathers,” language that belongs in a sermon, not a social studies standard.
It further calls for creating a “Presidential Commission on Patriotic Education,” echoing the widely ridiculed 1776 Commission Trump launched in his previous term. That document, roundly condemned by scholars across the political spectrum, read like a hyper-partisan manifesto rather than a serious work of scholarship. Its resurrection under a new name does not inspire confidence.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with teaching students about American ideals. We should teach the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—not as objects of worship but as frameworks whose promises have too often been delayed or denied. The Civil Rights Movement, for example, is not an “anti-American” story but a quintessentially American one—ordinary citizens demanding that the nation live up to its founding principles.
Yet Trump’s order implies that any acknowledgment of historical injustice is inherently subversive. This is historically illiterate and morally bankrupt. Imagine a doctor who refused to diagnose an illness for fear of making the patient uncomfortable. That’s the kind of education Trump prescribes: one that hides symptoms and ignores causes, all in the name of national self-esteem.
This is not about education. This is about control.
Trump proposes a top-down national narrative enforced by federal authority—a textbook example (no pun intended) of state-mandated history. He might cloak it in red, white, and blue, but this is the same ideological coercion employed by authoritarian regimes throughout history. From Stalin’s Soviet Union to Franco’s Spain, despots have always sought to bend history into a weapon of national myth-making. We should not be so naïve as to think it cannot happen here.
The executive order also singles out “Critical Race Theory” and “leftist academic fads” as existential threats to the republic. But the real danger is not academic theory—it is historical amnesia. The refusal to acknowledge past injustices is what perpetuates them. If students are not taught how racism has shaped our institutions, how can they possibly understand the world they inhabit? How can they become informed citizens in a multiracial democracy if their education is built on denial?
As a history educator in Florida, I am already contending with state laws that limit how race and gender can be discussed in the classroom. These restrictions have chilled honest conversation and driven talented educators from the profession. Trump’s executive order would take that censorship nationwide.
And let’s be honest: this is not about “protecting children” or “preserving unity.” It is about enforcing conformity. It is about ensuring that a single, triumphalist narrative—one that elevates certain voices while erasing others—remains dominant. That is not history. That is propaganda.
I write this not only as a teacher, but as a citizen. Our democracy depends on an educated public capable of grappling with nuance, tolerating discomfort, and thinking critically. Trump’s executive order undermines all of that. It reduces education to cheerleading and scholarship to nationalism. It is the intellectual equivalent of setting fire to a library and calling it illumination.
We do not need “restored truth.” We need historical honesty. We need the courage to look our past in the eye, to admit where we’ve fallen short, and to challenge the next generation to do better. That, not myth-making, is the real patriotic project.
The executive order must be opposed—not just by educators, but by anyone who values truth, democracy, and the freedom to learn.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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