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TRUMP’S WHITE NATIONALISM AND THE FUTURE OF HISTORY  
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William Sturkey
August 11, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Being a historian during Trump 2.0 is to witness a renewal of
debunked mythologies and outdated ideas made fresh by a state
apparatus deeply invested in protecting the historical reputation of
whiteness. _

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To be a historian in the time of Trump 2.0 is to teach and write
history at a time when the federal government is being mobilized to
promote a white nationalist version of American history. Plenty of
previous politicians offered tacit sympathies for white nationalist
ideas with coded terms like “states’ rights
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and “law and order
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but we have to journey back over one hundred years, to the presidency
of Woodrow Wilson, to find an executive branch so supportive
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white nationalist ideologies in the study of American history.

A white nationalist vision of American history is one that centers
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role of white Americans above all others and, in fact, typically
treats the history of the nation and the race as one and the same. For
white nationalists, the United States is a nation created and founded
by white people, and American history necessarily spurns the
contributions of all other groups. The sins of slavery, segregation,
and violence are excused as minor blemishes made along a path toward
greatness. It was the accomplishments of America’s great white men,
we are led to believe, that brought us the prosperity for which we
should all be so thankful. To question them—even if they enslaved,
raped, and killed for power, expansion, or wealth—would be to
question America itself.

Various versions of this story exist. For decades, the most pervasive
version of this mythology lived
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the American South. From practically the day after the Civil War,
white Southerners crafted
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white nationalist morality tale—in popular culture, veterans’
organizations, and the Lost Cause ideology—of lazy Black slaves with
generous white masters who in the 1860s did their best to fight off a
war of “Northern Aggression” that threatened white Southern
freedom. For most of the twentieth century, this story was advanced
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groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or
UDC—activists who dedicated much of their lives to celebrating white
Confederate heritage. They published
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and led
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ceremonies honoring the legacy of the Southern white men who tried to
destroy the United States.

Meanwhile, Black historians such as W.E.B. Du Bois and John Hope
Franklin were literally segregated
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the archives, banned from studying in Southern libraries because they
were Black. When Franklin went to an archive to conduct research,
he recalled
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arrival created a panic and an emergency among the administrators….
The archivist frankly informed me that I was the first Negro who had
sought to use the facilities there.” Black people were not supposed
to be in the archives, let alone be in charge of telling America’s
history.

Since American public universities fully desegregated
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the 1960s, historians of different backgrounds have
thoroughly dispelled
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Southern Lost Cause and other white nationalist mythologies. These
historians see more nuance
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Founding Fathers who called for freedom even as they enslaved humans.
As Franklin explained of his groundbreaking book
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Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans,_ “My challenge
was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the
presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be
told adequately and fairly.” Subsequent decades of cutting-edge
research have rescued millions of nonwhite actors from the
margins—Native Americans
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Americans
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Americans
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and more—showing that they also played major roles in the formation
of the United States. In other words, America wasn’t just built by
white people. The struggles of millions, not only the brilliance of a
select white few, are what made possible American affluence and
endurance.

The good news is that today, in spite of Trump’s efforts, historians
are telling more complete stories, ones that don’t rely on
half-baked truths, veiled hypocrisies, or a racially segregated
professoriat. And the public is hungry for works that offer a more
complete retelling of the American experience. Buoyed by the Black
Lives Matter movement, African American history in particular has
surged in popularity. From bestselling Black history books like _The
Warmth of Other Suns
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New York Times’ _1619 Project
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the explosively popular genre of Black historical fiction and film,
African American history is now enmeshed in popular culture as never
before. Books like _James
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films like _Sinners [[link removed]] _center
the Black experience, drawing millions of readers and viewers yearning
for Black stories from the past. The murder of George Floyd in
2020 created
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tidal wave of white sympathy for the African American experience. Amid
such demand, the federal government and so many of America’s
institutions, from the Smithsonian
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the National Football League
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responded with efforts to better teach and study the history of race
in America. Juneteenth finally became
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federal holiday in 2021.

Trump 2.0 seeks a reversal of all of these strides toward a
pluralistic history. The new Trump administration is staking claims to
racial morality by stressing the excesses of and seeking
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destroy diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs
that multiplied
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the wake of George Floyd. The administration cannot make Americans
uninterested in the history of race, nor can it turn back a cultural
marketplace that offers serious profits for great stories about race
in America. But it can use the tools of the state to influence, even
poison, how history will be taught in America’s public forums and
schools.

On Juneteenth, the federal holiday established after George Floyd
to commemorate Emancipation, Trump decided against issuing a formal
holiday greeting, choosing instead to argue that America had
too many holidays that took away from economic productivity. Of all
the federal holidays to dismiss, of course it was the one
expressly dedicated to a Black cause.

Trump’s new administration is openly scrubbing
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government websites of Black and Brown people, removing
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to American heroes like Medgar Evers, the Navajo Code Talkers, and the
trailblazing female veterans, while also promising
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restore the names of Confederates to military bases. Fort Bragg,
originally named after a white supremacist Confederate general before
being renamed Fort Liberty in 2023, has once again been renamed
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Bragg (although it’s now cynically named for a different Bragg, a
World War II soldier).

On Juneteenth, the federal holiday established after George Floyd to
commemorate Emancipation, Trump decided against issuing a formal
holiday greeting, choosing instead to argue
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America had too many holidays that took away from economic
productivity. Of all the federal holidays to dismiss, of course it was
the one expressly dedicated to a Black cause. A Trump executive order
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March called for citizens’ support in “advancing the policy of
this order,” in other words, reporting federal historical sites that
spend too much time focusing on the perspectives of nonwhites. The UDC
would be proud. In fact, one historian of Civil War memory noted
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Trump’s Black History Month Proclamation “reads as if it was
released from the headquarters of the United Daughters of the
Confederacy.”

These approaches to history resurrect some of the very same failed
historical arguments made by white nationalist groups of the past. And
so part of being a historian during Trump 2.0 is to witness a renewal
of debunked mythologies and outdated ideas made fresh by a state
apparatus deeply invested in protecting the historical reputation of
whiteness.

And yet, Trump 2.0’s flawed and racist approach to history will
probably offer little in the way of substantive change for serious
historical study
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The Trump allies promoting censorship are only interested in
prevention, not innovative creation, ceding the field to those of us
who really do care about honest history. And unfortunately for Trump
and his supporters, the censors can’t reach everywhere. Knowledge
today comes from many quarters. Millions of students may be blocked
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learning American history in public school classrooms, but the Trump
administration cannot completely block them from accessing American
history from other venues. Today’s censors will never again enjoy
the same stranglehold that white nationalists once had on the
production of the past. Even if an eighth grader in South Carolina is
blocked from studying Frederick Douglass in their classroom, state
laws cannot prevent them from accessing additional information online,
in film, or in podcasts.

Oddly enough, Trump 2.0 has also created opportunities for better
understanding the history of race in America. It can be difficult for
modern students to fully appreciate the intensity with which people
fought over race in previous eras of American history. Across the
country, even in the North, everyday white citizens were willing to go
so far as to bomb
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buses to stop the desegregation of elementary schools. Students
struggle to understand the motivations of people like the
women screaming
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Black teenagers at Little Rock Central High School in 1957
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activists who shouted
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wait for your daughter to be raped by these Congolese. Don’t wait
until the burrheads are forced into your schools. Do something about
it now,” in order to intimidate six-year-old Ruby Bridges when she
entered the first grade in 1960
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Orleans.

I have been teaching those ugly episodes for years, but the reactions
of my students this spring were different than ever before. Students
now recognize their present in the past. There was a time when the
sight of adults screaming
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school board meetings might have appeared very foreign. Now, that’s
just part of America’s political culture. The incivility of the
present helps us to understand the ugliness of the past.

Perhaps the greatest consequence of Trump’s second term will be the
retardation of America’s ability to have a true national reckoning
on race. The United States has not deeply explored its own racial
history with an eye toward a constructive public process of
reconciliation. Historians argue
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such a reckoning, if done well, would hold the promise to help us
break free from the cancerous orbit of race that has poisoned life in
America since its founding. The ancient hope of that reconciliation is
precisely what Trumpism and its enablers intend to prevent. After a
brief moment when some historians began discussing the possibility of
a “Third Reconstruction,” Trump 2.0 brings the full force of the
federal government against
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promise, erasing Black and Brown histories from public display and
recentering white voices above all others so as to align with the
white nationalist fairy tale that they tell themselves is America.

_William Sturkey [[link removed]] is
an associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania
and the author of The Ballad of Roy Benavidez: The Life and Times of
America’s Most Famous Hispanic War Hero._

_The New Republic [[link removed]] was founded in 1914 to
bring liberalism into the modern era. The founders understood that the
challenges facing a nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution
and mass immigration required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
questions: how to build a more inclusive and democratic civil society,
and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
inequality. We also face challenges that belong entirely to this age,
from the climate crisis to Republicans hell-bent on subverting
democratic governance._

_We’re determined to continue building on our founding mission._

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* teaching history
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* white nationalism
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* Black History
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* Donald Trump
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* censorship
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