Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 12.5% (224 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 7.3% (130 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 6.3% (112 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 3.8% (67 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 6.5% (116 hits)
• Framing Effect - 6.2% (111 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0.7% (13 hits)
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 5.7% (102 hits)

Article text

Trump’s War on History

On a June afternoon in Washington, swarms of mosquitoes were feasting on thousands of Americans as they watched a military parade roll past the National Mall.

It was the US Army’s 250th birthday, which also happened to be President Donald Trump’s 79th, and the MAGA-heavy crowd watched the procession trudge down Constitution Avenue, largely silent but for the squeaking of armored personnel carriers.

Groups of soldiers marched by at seemingly random intervals, as if to foreshadow the actual military occupation Trump would unleash on the city two months later.

It was overcast and muggy, and spectators had lined up for hours to get inside the security perimeter.

Uniformed troops were handing out free bottles of Phorm Energy—a beverage launched nationally the month before by Anheuser-Busch and Dana White, a vocal Trump supporter who runs the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Phorm, which bills itself as the “ultimate energy drink,” is an official sponsor of America250, a government-funded nonprofit organizing a series of celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday, culminating on July 4 this year.

When asked, a soldier explained he had been ordered to hand out the samples—despite Defense Department rules that bar the military from endorsing “a particular company, product, service, or website.”

The Pentagon didn’t answer questions about this apparent violation.

So it goes with the Trump administration’s approach to the country’s semiquincentennial.

Congress is expected to allocate some $150 million for the festivities, but that’s not enough to fulfill Trump’s vision.

So corporations with links to the president or his inner circle—UFC, Palantir, Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase—have signed on as sponsors, pouring in millions of dollars alongside companies like Chrysler, Coca-Cola, and General Mills.

American history offers a medium through which Trump can wage the all-encompassing cultural, political, and legal battles animating his administration.

The promise of all that cash and spectacle helped America250 lure a flock of political operatives with Trump ties.

Chris LaCivita, who helped steer Trump’s 2024 campaign, joined as a strategic adviser.

Campaign Nucleus, founded in 2021 by former Trump campaign honcho Brad Parscale, helped organize America250 events.

So did Event Strategies, which staged Trump campaign gatherings in 2020 and 2024, as well as the January 6, 2021, rally near the White House that preceded the attack on the US Capitol.

America250 said in January that it’s no longer working with these contractors but hasn’t disclosed how much they were paid.

America250 and the White House insist they are planning nonpartisan festivities for all Americans, rather than creating a slush fund to throw the president militarized birthday parties and advance hard-right ideology.

But in reality, American history is being subordinated to Trump’s cult of personality.

The president’s face is suddenly everywhere—next to George Washington on America250-themed National Parks passes; alongside Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on giant banners hanging from federal buildings; on a $1 coin under consideration by the US Treasury.

President Donald Trump watches US Army soldiers marching in the June 14, 2025, military parade through Washington, DC.

Faced with sporadic pushback from a congressional commission overseeing America250 and from career officials at various agencies, Trump is now seeking to evade even these modest constraints.

In December, he launched a new organization, Freedom 250, that could implement his most outlandish anniversary events without the inconvenience of legislative oversight or mandatory bipartisanship.

For the president's 80th birthday this year, Freedom 250 will help organize a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

The semiquincentennial is just one part of the commander in chief's broader campaign to harness the mechanisms of the federal government to enforce his preferred version of the nation’s history and culture—a Trumpified presentation of America’s past and present.

On the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, the administration even rolled out a taxpayer-funded webpage seeking to recast the day’s events as a patriotic effort to protest “the fraudulent election.”

Three weeks later, Trump's FBI seized hundreds of thousands of 2020 ballots and other election material from Georgia's largest county.

“TRUMP WON BIG,” the president declared the next morning.

“Crooked Election!”

Since his inauguration last year, Trump has taken personal control of the Kennedy Center—reshaping its artistic programming, installing a MAGA-dominated board that claims to have renamed it in his honor, and then closing it for renovations.

He’s railed against “OUT OF CONTROL” museums that he insists are too focused on “how bad Slavery was.”

He has successfully pressured the Smithsonian Institution to review displays to ensure “unbiased content” and has extracted significant concessions over what top universities teach students.

At his direction, the National Park Service has altered or removed scores of exhibits at parks and historic sites on topics including slavery, Native Americans, climate change, and even fossils.

Trump acolytes are also leveraging federal dollars to stop local librarians and educators from sharing content they dislike.

Under the pretense of stamping out “woke” ideas and promoting patriotism, the White House is attempting to mandate uncritical acceptance of its own take on the American story, one that celebrates the martial feats of mostly white men and an imagined religious and ideological conformity that minimizes the fights, tribulations, and dissenters who have defined the country.

It’s an effort that flies in the face of American ideals—and reality.

“In a pluralist democracy, there are invariably conflicts of values,” says Alexander Karn, a Colgate University historian who has written about the 250th anniversary.

“To deny that messiness by seeking to erase the perspectives that don’t flatter a dominant group or help create a triumphal history is anti-egalitarian and, therefore, anti-democratic.”

Instead, Karn argues, “the road to a ‘more perfect Union,’ which is enshrined in the Constitution, runs through the past, and it depends on our willingness to confront our history in an honest and thoroughgoing way.”

Which is not the road we’re on.

“It’s a beautiful sight to be with you in a place called Fort Bragg,” Trump said in June 2025, emphasizing the massive Army base’s name as soldiers holding American flags cheered.

He continued: “Can you believe they changed that name in the last administration for a little bit?”

Some of the troops booed loudly.

Fort Bragg, originally named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg, had been redubbed Fort Liberty during the Biden administration.

After retaking office, Trump restored its old name, taking advantage of a loophole in a 2020 law barring military bases from honoring Confederate leaders.

Officially, the fort’s name now refers to Private First Class Roland L.

Bragg, a World War II Silver Star recipient, whom Trump never mentioned during his speech that day.

“We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P.

Hill, and Fort Robert E.

Lee,” Trump added to applause.

Dictators brook no opposition, and this extends to the past.

The Fort Bragg speech—an official America250 event that had been billed as patriotic and bipartisan—took place days after Trump had ordered the military to crack down on anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles.

From the beginning, it looked a lot like a political rally.

It was promoted by Never Surrender Inc., formerly the principal campaign committee for Trump’s 2024 run.

“You’ve been invited to Fort Bragg by President Trump!”

blared the subject line of an email that exhorted readers to “Make America Great Again!”

MAGA merchandise was for sale at the event, and the troops in the audience had been handpicked “based on political leanings and physical appearance,” the news outlet Military.com later reported.

The screening effort apparently worked.

Uniformed soldiers cheered Trump administration policies and booed when the president attacked “incompetent” Democrats like California Gov.

Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass.

“Los Angeles has gone from being one of the cleanest, safest, and most beautiful cities on Earth to being a trash heap with entire neighborhoods under the control of transnational gangs and criminal networks,” Trump insisted.

“We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again.”

But Trump’s vision for “freeing” America’s second-largest city went beyond using the military to control occasionally violent protests—he also declared his intention to curtail basic constitutional liberties.

The demonstrators, he complained, “don’t carry the American flag; they only burn it.”

Flag burners “should go to jail for one year,” he said.

“And we’ll see if we can get that done.”

More cheers.

Rallies that celebrate a simplified, sanctified historical narrative have long been a favorite tool of autocrats.

“Dictators brook no opposition, and this extends to the past,” says Karn, the Colgate historian.

“When a dictator is intent on creating or sustaining a hierarchical social order, he will see to it that history abides.”

The military parade through Washington four days later proved to be a clumsy prelude for Trump’s very real efforts to deploy troops, along with heavily armed federal agents, on the streets of even more cities—often against the wishes of local officials.

To justify sending the National Guard to Portland, the president made false claims about widespread violence, perhaps because Fox News repeatedly re-aired violent footage from 2020 as though it were part of the 2025 anti-ICE protests.

Since August, the Labor Department’s DC headquarters has displayed an America250-branded banner with a Mao-style image of Trump above the words “American Workers First.”

The spectacle drew attention when National Guard members deployed by Trump were photographed beneath it—an image that captures the authoritarian ethos of his second term.

The troops, supposedly dispatched to Washington to fight crime, are now staying on in connection with the semiquincentennial.

In an October court filing, the DC attorney general revealed that Guard leaders were planning for a prolonged deployment.

“We know that America250 occurs this summer, and that will be a factor in determining the future of the mission,” a Guard commanding general wrote in an email included in the filing.

In January, Trump officially extended the DC operation through the end of 2026, even as he bowed to court rulings blocking him from unleashing the armed forces on other parts of the country.

That Trump’s enthusiasm for the domestic use of troops is merging with America’s 250th festivities is almost too easy a metaphor.

To celebrate the anniversary of a war sparked in part by the quartering of soldiers in US cities, the administration is lengthening a military occupation vehemently opposed by the local population.

A quarter-millennium later, amid “No Kings” protests and an unprecedented executive power grab, the arguments against tyranny that inspired American independence are alive and pressing.

It seems worth asking whether America250 will celebrate the ideals of the country’s founders—or those of the monarch they rebelled against.

Clarification, February 4: The description of statements made by the American Association for State and Local History and its president has been revised for clarity.