Throughout history, authoritarian regimes have sought to manipulate the historical record to legitimate their ideological projects and disguise their criminality. Joseph Stalin edited photographs to remove rivals whose executions he ordered. Nazis dynamited the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz in 1945 to hide the evidence of the Holocaust from the advancing Red Army.
Today, we see similar attempts to erase, distort, and censor history in a host of countries, from Turkey to China to India to Russia. Under these regimes, authorities exert strict control over history, and “official narratives” determine what can, or cannot, safely be said about the past.
In the United States, the question of who controls historical knowledge is once again front and center, and there are worrying signs of increasing repression. According to PEN America, 361 educational gag orders have been introduced by state legislatures since 2021. Many of these laws specifically target history education.
With Donald Trump back in the White House, Americans should brace themselves for fresh abuses of history. Indeed, the rewriting of the past has already begun. Mere hours after swearing his oath, Trump signed an executive order granting pardons and commutations to more than 1,500 individuals convicted of federal crimes related to the January 6 insurrection.
With a stroke of his Sharpie, Trump scrubbed what the FBI had characterized as an act of domestic terrorism and reconstrued the attack as an outpouring of patriotic valor. Instead of affirming the crime and offering mercy, Trump grants absolution and proclaims a monopoly on truth.
The expansive scope of Trump’s pardon reportedly took some of his own aides by surprise. The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest law enforcement union in the country has denounced the decision. Meanwhile, three federal judges have criticized the order, with one calling it “a revisionist myth” and another saying the pardon “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake.”
Even Pamela Hemphill, the so-called “MAGA granny,” refused Trump’s pardon, saying “I pleaded guilty because I was guilty, and accepting a pardon also would serve to contribute to their gaslighting and false narrative.”
Of course, Trump’s repeated falsehoods, including his insistence that no one was killed at the Capitol, mirror the propaganda techniques used by other autocrats. In a healthier information ecosystem, the lies he peddles would be ridiculed as strongman kitsch. As it stands, they are increasingly accommodated.
According to a recent NPR report, official tours of the Capitol—each year nearly two million visit—make no mention of January 6. Similarly, the website for the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center includes no information about January 6, which even Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, at the time called “a failed insurrection.”
Across the Potomac, officials at the Pentagon removed a portrait of retired Army Gen. Mark Milley from public display just hours after Trump’s swearing-in ceremony. Milley had called Trump “a threat to democracy” and “a total fascist” during the latter’s re-election campaign. The New York Times has called this move “an early salvo by the new administration against [the] military establishment.” More than this, it is another example of Trump removing from the historical record the things he cannot accept.
The pattern here is clear. In an interview from January 6, 2025, Trump said he intended to replace Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States, because he felt that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), under her direction, had not done enough to protect the legacy of the United States. Trump also blamed Shogan’s predecessor for the classified documents case (later dismissed) which the Department of Justice brought against him in 2023.
While NARA, as part of the federal government, strives to be nonpartisan, Trump aims to capture the archives for his own purposes. We are witnessing in real time the hijacking of history, not with box-cutters but with executive edicts and administrative “overhaul.”
In an earlier era, authoritarian leaders ruled the past and present with an iron fist. Just as individuals disappeared into penal camps, never to re-emerge, historical records faded into archival oblivion. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera summed this up neatly: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
With MAGA in its ascendency, the abuse of history has also taken a more subtle form. Besides the memory holes that Kundera illuminated, we must also contend with the proliferation of false and deliberately deceptive histories conjured by memory trolls. Trump and his minions now use their platforms to replace vetted historical knowledge and rigorous methods of inquiry with “alternative facts” and reckless, conjectural readings of the past.
Another Czech intellectual, Václav Havel, can help us see where this is leading. Before he became president of Czechoslovakia following the collapse of communism in 1989, Havel was a dissident playwright who sometimes penned dangerously honest open letters to government leaders. These provocations landed Havel in prison on four separate occasions.
Havel’s best-known essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” concerns life under “post-totalitarian” dictatorship and the demoralizing effects of living in truth-deprived conditions. It is about the exhaustion of revolutionary politics, and what remains when the ruling party has proven its incompetence, but still exercises unchallenged power.
In the essay, Havel writes: “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”
Toward the end of the essay, Havel warns that the conditions in his country should serve as a warning to Western democracies. When bad actors are given free rein and the electorate is sufficiently deluded or discouraged, democracies can easily tip toward the conditions Havel elucidated. Not every form of subservience is imposed; some are willingly accepted. If the regime pretends not to pretend, it is up to ordinary citizens whether they will play along.
Trump wants a triumphal past. His Second Inaugural Address was saturated by nation-glorifying imagery and rhetoric. In the MAGA historical imaginary, America wins all the time—except when internal enemies block the application of “common sense.” The past Trump desires is the present MAGA has embraced: rugged, manly, expansionist, culturally uniform, and unapologetic.
The problem with MAGA history is not simply that it is untrue—America’s past includes much to celebrate, but also much to mourn and repent. The deeper issue is that MAGA history is nakedly ideological. It obliterates what it does not desire and poisons what it cannot abide. Instead of being open to multiple perspectives, it strives to be univocal. MAGA, as we are seeing, refuses to share reality—or history—with those who do not pledge their fealty to its leaders.
What this requires is easy to state, yet difficult to practice. Havel called it “the free expression of life [born of] living within the truth.” To this end, we must defend history against political hijacking and partisan abuse.
According to the most recent American Values Survey conducted by PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute), only one in four Americans agree with Trump’s claim that the January 6 rioters are patriots who were unjustly prosecuted. Americans are not deeply divided on this crucial question. Here, at least, we do not require a lengthy inquiry into the problem of “polarization.”
Can we muster the courage to do what’s needed to ensure our moral and historical integrity? Let’s hope so. With MAGA history, once the regime has pronounced its truth, there is nothing left to say, no space for civic discourse. In a pluralist democracy, a diverse citizenry excavates the past together, and history is pieced together through collective and shared reflection.
The difference between these two approaches is no small thing. MAGA will gladly dictate history (and much more besides), unless we can locate and articulate it through open and principled dialogue.