Photo by Mizanur Rahman on Unsplash
Trump Lords Over Attempts To Stir Up The ‘Unpredictable Past’ In His Image
Trump is on a roll in his war to rewrite history and he could learn a lot from the former Soviet Union and a southern group that continues to spread lies about the honorable US confederacy.
A saying among the Soviet intelligentsia reminded all that “We live in a country with an unpredictable past.” The state of mind control left people to wonder which part of their history would be annihilated next.
America’s “unpredictable past” is being revised to reflect trump’s memory‑engineering, mass amnesia project, a version of a nation steeped in honorable, white nationalism; not one that was shamed with the unmentionable curse of enslavement.
The biggest whitewashing in American history was the decision to identify the “Civil War” as the brutal battle waged by southern slaveholders from April 12, 1861, to April 9, 1865.
There was nothing civil about the Civil War, a euphemism created to avoid describing the real cause of the war, which was the southern slaveholders’ refusal to end enslavement. It was a war waged by slaveholders against the United States to hold Black Americans in bondage; it was anything but civil.
In 2024, trump put out his own brand of self-serving disinformation when he said that the Civil War could have been avoided if President Lincoln had read trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal.”
“The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible,” trump said. “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster.”
Trump’s deal would undoubtedly have bargained away the freedom of four million enslaved people in exchange for a unsavory, transitory peace.
The Civil War, as it is generally called, was known initially as the “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” but through the years, amid strong lobbying by Confederate heritage groups that wanted to sanitize the dark history of enslavement, it was referred to as the “War Between the States” and finally, the Civil War.
The most honest appraisal came from revolutionary communist, Karl Marx, wrote Lincoln in 1864 on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association, and referred to the war as “the American Antislavery War.”
Southerners have referred to the “War for Southern Independence” or “The War of Northern Aggression” while the Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson, regularly called it the “second war for independence.” Others called the conflict, “The Confederate War,” “Buchanan’s War” (after President James Buchanan Jr. who served from 1857 to 1861), Mr. Lincoln’s War”, and “Mr. (Confederate president Jefferson) Davis’s War.”
Other euphemistic terms include “The Late Unpleasantness” and “The Recent Unpleasantness,” and in the South, “The War of the Sections” and “The Brothers’ War,” especially in the border states.
The confederates refused the label of “rebels” in order to show their false notion that the abolitionists brought on the war by their efforts to abolish slavery.
The abolitionist and statesman, Frederick Douglass, put the lie to the southern claims in his July 4, 1862 essay, “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion.” Not long after, President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation would go into effect on January 1, 1863.
Two years into the war, Douglass wrote that “all but the willfully blind or the malignantly traitorous, know and confess that this whole movement, which now so largely distracts the country, and threatens ruin to the nation, has its root and its sap, its trunk and its branches, and the bloody fruit it bears only from the one source of all abounding abomination, and that is slavery.”
He explained the cause of the war this way.
“There is however one false theory of the origin of the war to which a moment’s reply may be properly given here. It is this. The abolitionists by their insane and unconstitutional attempt to abolish slavery, have brought on the war,” Douglass said.
In July 1861, Sen. Samuel Pomeroy, R-Kan., proposed “a bill to suppress the slaveholders’ rebellion.”
“It is right to tell them (southern slaveholders) they have caused this civil commotion, and that Slavery must be its price if not ended honorably at once in harmony with the Constitution, by having every State return to its former loyalty,” the bill noted.
The reference was met with quick and strong disapproval, including from Sen. John Breckinridge, D-Ky., who was later the vice president under President James Buchanan. Breckinridge said Pomeroy’s bill created “odium and prejudice against a particular interest,” slavery.
To this day, the U.S. Government Style Manual lists only “Civil War,” “War of the Rebellion” and “War Between the States” as acceptable euphemisms in the linguistic battle.
Trump’s Racism
The distinction in the name of the “Civil War” rather than the “Slaveholders Rebellion” remains strong, bolstered by a racist president. On April 9, trump issued a statement on the anniversary of the southern surrender at Appomattox, which signaled the end to the war.
“Following four brutal years of suffering, sacrifice, and unthinkable tragedy during the Civil War, the fate of the Union was secured in triumph when General Robert E. Lee formally issued his surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House — ending the war, healing the wounds of division, and restoring the full glory of the American promise,” trump said.
According to trump, by the spring of 1865, Confederate forces were cut off from reserves and surrounded on all fronts “and the culmination of our Nation’s most horrific war fell at the hands of these two great men of history (Grant and Lee) in a humble home in the Virginia countryside.”
Trump went on to describe how “the excruciating toll of the Civil War weighed heavily all across the country: Hundreds of thousands of American lives were lost, families were torn apart, brother met brother on the field of battle, and our Nation’s most sacred values and commitments stood in grave peril.”
He ended with “To this day, the surrender at Appomattox stands as an enduring testament to the resilience of a divided Nation, the strength and resolve of the American people, and the sacred ideals at the heart of our national identity. Today, we recommit to the eternal truth that the United States of America is blessed from on high; bound together by justice; and was, is, and will forever be one Nation under God.”
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There is not one mention in trump’s address of the enslavement of more than four million African Americans and around 500,000 free African Americans who were living in the United States at the beginning of the war. Altogether they made up 14 percent of the population of the country. There is no word of the treason committed in the name of the southern landowners whose riches were made on the backs of the enslaved.
Not one word in all of trump’s statement.
Trump also refers to “two great men of history,” Grant, who led the Union forces and deserved the label as “great” and Lee, who carried the banner for the slaveholders and was anything but “great.”
Trump used similar memory reconstruction and moral laundering regarding the Jan. 6, 2021, deadly insurrection at the Capitol by thousands of trump supporters. Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and said they were victims of a “grave national injustice.” The pardons were an act of “national reconciliation,” trump said.
Rewriting History
Various forces have joined to re-write the history of the confederacy. That includes the 90-year-old United Daughters of the Confederacy, which today has more than 900 chapters in 37 states, France and Mexico. Members are women who trace their ancestry to men who fought or gave aid to the Confederate side in the Civil War. Another is the Children of the Confederacy, an auxiliary organization to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy describes itself as historical, educational, benevolent, memorial, and patriotic in mission. It maintains Confederate cemeteries, monuments, and archival collections; awards undergraduate and graduate scholarships tied to Southern heritage; issues service awards and volunteers at US Veterans Administration hospitals; operates two libraries and a museum in Richmond, Va.; and actively opposes legislation it views as targeting Confederate heritage groups.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy promoted white Southern solidarity, legitimizing racial segregation and white supremacy. The organization worked to “define southern identity around images from an Old South that portrayed slavery as benign and slaves as happy and a Reconstruction that portrayed blacks as savage and immoral.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) considers the United Daughters of the Confederacy to be part of the white supremacist, Neo-Confederate movement. In August 2018, the confederacy website still noted that “Slaves, for the most part, were faithful and devoted. Most slaves were usually ready and willing to serve their masters.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Children of the Confederacy remain active in trying to influence the government to maintain hundreds of monuments to the confederacy and to lobby schools to offer a revised version of the Civil War, one that reflects the so-called “Lost Cause” myth. The myth is a post–Civil War narrative that reframed the war as a struggle for states’ rights and Southern honor rather than the preservation of slavery. The myth promotes a romanticized vision of the antebellum South and emerged after 1865 as a way for confederates to cope with defeat and reshape public memory.
Around 685 Confederate monuments remain standing in public spaces across the U.S., out of more than 2,000 total Confederate symbols. The monuments are dedicated to Confederate leaders, soldiers and the Confederacy itself.
Most Confederate monuments were erected long after the Civil War, primarily between the 1890s and 1950s, coinciding with the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement.
Efforts to remove Confederate monuments have accelerated in recent years, particularly following events like the 2015 Charleston, S.C., church shooting in which a white supremacist shot and killed nine people and the 2020 protests to the murder of African American George Floyd by a white Minnesota police officer. Since 2015, hundreds of monuments and symbols have been removed, but the majority remain due to state laws protecting them or local resistance.
Trump has been firmly opposed to the removal and vandalism of Confederate statues and has directed federal protection and restoration of memorials. His June 2020 executive order condemned statue removals as criminal and politically motivated, while he defended southern “heritage” and continued a policy of restoring toppled monuments and reviewing removals.
In 2025, the Trump administration announced it would be restoring two Confederate monuments in Washington. One, a statue of Confederate general and likely Ku Klux Klan member Albert Pike, was torn down by protesters with ropes and chains during the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. The other, the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, originally commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was removed on the recommendation of an independent commission in 2022.
Until the mid-20th century, children in southern schools learned from Lyon Gardiner Tyler’s “Catechism on the History of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865.” The book says that Northerners did away with slavery because the climate was unsuitable, that they had no intention of ever paying the South for its slaves after abolition, that slaves in the South were faithful to their owners, who were caring and gentle people and that cruel slave owners existed only in the North.
In 1919 the lost cause narrative was codified in Mildred Rutherford’s “Measuring Rod to Test Text Books and Reference Books,” which was used through the 1940s, to review, censor and rewrite approved school textbooks across the South.
Rutherford was the historian-general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The reference book pressed southern schools to use textbooks that portray secession as constitutional and noble, minimize or distort slavery’s role in the Civil War and should present the North as responsible for the conflict.
Through the mid-1940s, nearly 70 million Southern students were taught that the enslaved were actually servants and that the Confederates fought merely to preserve a Southern way of life.
DEI Campaign
The right wing campaign to eliminate programs of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a key element in the drive to discredit the abilities of and minimize the effects of racism on people of color. As part of the anti-DEI push, during the presidential campaign of 2024, trump diminished the abilities of Kamala Harris, an African American and the Democratic vice presidential candidate, by calling her “a DEI hire.”
The war on DEI is closely linked with efforts to censure any references to the effects of enslavement on the nation. Trump and other far-right politicians, lawyers, judges, and religious leaders believe that learning about the racial history of the United States, is anti-American.
Another example of trump’s attempts to redraft American history came shortly after his 2025 inauguration when he ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, D.C., warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” in the museums.
The order was based on a report written by the White House Domestic Policy Council which is loaded with representatives of right-wing think tanks and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, and Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute.
Rather than illuminating the nation’s heritage, the report claimed that “Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
According to the report, Smithsonian leadership and museum curators “Have directed the museum’s mission away from historical education and scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated, and toward extreme political activism, rooted in Marxism, to divide, dispirit and discourage Americans. … [And have] denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians and Americans while focusing on ‘race in areas where it has little to no historical relevance.”
The report concludes that the museum undermines faith in American institutions and shared ideals of the American people as it “purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.”
Tyrants’ revisions to history are not new. When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BCE, he rewrote Egyptian history to make himself the son of the god Amun.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin removed purged officials from photographs, rewrote textbooks, and reshaped official government accounts of the Russian Revolution and World War I to magnify his own role.
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime taught a racialized version of German history that portrayed Jews, Slavs, Roma and other racial and political minority groups as enemies and Germany as the victim of a “stabbed in the back” betrayal after World War I.
Mao Zedong oversaw revisions of Chinese history, with history textbooks and official records regularly edited or radically changed to meet his political needs. To this day, for example, the Chinese government has eliminated any reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
