In a potential blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to remove “negative” history from national parks, a federal judge has ordered the reinstatement of a slavery exhibit dismantled by the National Park Service last month at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.
Senior Judge Cynthia Rufe of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania offered a blistering critique of President Donald Trump’s history-setting agenda Monday, comparing his effort to limit educational material at parks to the “Ignorance is Strength” motto of the repressive government in George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984.”
Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in her opinion that the Trump administration has asked the court “to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”
The Monday ruling is the first legal barrier to Trump’s history agenda, prompted by an edict the president issued last year to “restore truth and sanity” to how the nation talks about its past. The executive order slammed what the president views as a “revisionist” movement. In that version of history, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” the executive order said.
