June 16, 2026 09:43 AM UTC

Courts Kibosh Trump Historical Whitewash

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the New York Times reported over the weekend, another front in Donald Trump’s cultural revolution, the push to purge historic sites of materials that fail to cast the generally white, generally male principal figures of American history in anything less than the most hagiographic light, has been stopped cold by a federal judge:

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the National Park Service from removing or revising signs, films and other materials at national parks across the country to comply with a directive from President Trump.

The ruling pauses enforcement of an executive order that called for removing or covering up materials at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans” or cast the United States “in a negative light.”

The judge, Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, also ordered the Park Service to restore within three weeks any exhibits that it had dismantled or altered.

As Rachel Cohen reports for KUNC public radio, sites affected by the judge’s order include Bent’s Old Fort in southeast Colorado, where the offending signage about a slaveholding family had not yet been removed. Others that had already been taken down, including signs in Montana that admit to the reality of climate change and in Wyoming conceding that white Americans were sometimes somewhat less than 100% honorable in relations with Native Americans, will need to be restored within three weeks:

Some of the interpretive materials officials removed in the Mountain West include:

· interpretive materials related to carbon dioxide emissions and climate change from Glacier National Park
· a sign at Grand Teton National Park explaining how Gustavus Cheyney Doane, a key member of an early Yellowstone expedition, had participated in a massacre of Native Americans
· displays at the Grand Canyon sharing how the federal government claimed tribal land to create the park
· a sign at Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument in Arizona that included an image of a visitor holding a Pride flag

Information at six other parks sites in the Mountain West was flagged for removal, including a sign at Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site in Colorado about a family’s ownership of enslaved people.

Although the news at the end of last week was dominated by Donald Trump’s name being removed from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., checking Trump’s desire to sanitize American history to gratify his cartoonish 1950s-era worldview–which invariably ties back to his pathological need to rewrite the history of the 2020 presidential election he lost–is much more important in the long run. There is nothing in American history that benefits future generations by its concealment. If it’s true for the UFOs, it’s true for America’s historical sins.

Trump himself will be considered one someday, and that’s what this is really all about.