Trump's move to sanitize US history gets little support with national park visitors

Source: The Guardian

Mon 18 Aug 2025 08.00 EDT
Last modified on Mon 18 Aug 2025 17.08 EDT


As part of his administration’s war on “woke”, Donald Trump has asked the American public to report anything “negative” about Americans in US national parks. But the public has largely refused to support a world view without inconvenient historical facts, comments submitted from national parks and seen by the Guardian show.

Notices have been erected at every National Park Service (NPS) site, which spans 433 national parks, monuments and battlefields, following an order from May entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, issued by Trump’s department of the interior. The president had demanded a crackdown on any material that “inappropriately disparages Americans”.

The signs ask visitors to report any damage to parks as well as, via QR code, to identify “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features”.

But a trove of nearly 500 comments relating to the signs submitted across the US by the public in June and July, seen by the Guardian, show that visitors have mostly been reluctant to demand the removal of park materials about the darker chapters of America’s past, such as slavery or the mistreatment of Native tribes.

“Are we such weak, fragile people that we can’t view the full length and breadth of our history?” one visitor to Muir Woods in California wrote in July after a sign called “history under construction” was taken down. “Are we so afraid that we have to hide factual history from the telling of our past? Oh, please!!”

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/18/national-park-visitors-signs-trump