Of all the presidents, Donald Trump – the man who would remake the Smithsonian and alter its presentation of “how bad slavery was”, as he put it – is surely the most ignorant of American history itself.

What Trump doesn’t know fills the Library of Congress, whose chief librarian he has fired, along with driving out the heads of the National Archives and the National Portrait Gallery, as well as dissolving programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities and defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which as a result has paused the acclaimed American Experience documentary series.

Trump claims he is tearing down the entire federal support for history in order to reveal the true story. In his executive order of 27 March, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, he stated: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” The “improper ideology” that needs to be extirpated is a “divisive, race-centered ideology”.

The White House issued a memo on 21 August, titled “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian”, citing a broad swath of scattered incidents ranging from “wokeness” to representations of immigration to a picture of the former leading health official Anthony Fauci, who is anathema to the right.

Trump appointed a review panel to be headed by his vice-president, JD Vance, and the attorney and White House staffer Lindsey Halligan, who is actually the one in charge of the project. Echoing Trump, she explained: “We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad.” She told Fox News, “What I saw when I was going through the museum, personally, was an overemphasis on slavery, and I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery.”

A Trump White House aide elaborated: “President Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable.” The aide had the Trump formula down pat: after the purge comes the retribution. Trump tweeted: “I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.”

When Trump met on 28 August with Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian and founding director of the Smithsonian’s African American Museum of History, he brought along Halligan as his expert.

Her credentials for this crucial assignment in the culture war – after twice competing in the Miss Colorado USA beauty pageant, then becoming an insurance lawyer in Florida – must have been her work as one of Trump’s attorneys involved in the case over classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Trump initially noticed her at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach in 2021. She is now, in addition to her other duties, the de facto Trump White House historian-in-residence. She told the Washington Post she was interested in the civil war and westward expansion. A former colleague described her as “a fan of history”.

Beyond Halligan’s comments in a letter about packaging the past into a palatable Happy Meal of “ideals” and “Americanism”, the administration did not present its actual alternative history or the policies that flow from it. Trump bellowed that the Smithsonian contained “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future”.

But this gospel of positive-thinking twaddle aside, Trump, proudly ignorant though he is, has for years articulated a vision of American history. That vision does not emphasize the strides the nation has made through tumultuous struggle since the abolition of slavery. Instead, it honors the those who defended slavery, committed treason to preserve it and claim it to be a worthy American “heritage”.

Trump has repeatedly sought to shield the Confederate statues and symbols erected as tribute to the “lost cause” myth. He has expressed and unqualified admiration for Robert E Lee as a quintessential American hero almost always coupled with belittling remarks about Lincoln. His view of history squarely aligns him with neo-Confederates, not least those who carried the Confederate flag at the US Capitol during the insurrection on 6 January 2021 and whom he subsequently pardoned.

Trump’s version of history is not, however, simply reactionary nostalgia, or treacly kitsch for the restoration of “Uncle Herschel”, the “Old-Timer” to the Cracker Barrel logo. His use of the culture war is a key element to advance his policy agenda.

After the civil war, in reaction to Reconstruction, the southern slaveholding oligarchy regrouped to form the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist militias, most under the direction of former Confederate officers, to destroy the possibilities of emancipation and civil rights in the name of what they called “redemption”. Nearly a century later, the civil rights revolution of the 1960s overthrew the southern segregationist regime to restore and expand the enforcement of the original civil war amendments to the US constitution – the 14th amendment securing equal protection under the law and birthright citizenship and the 15th amendment protecting Black voting rights. The great southern historian C Vann Woodward called the civil rights movement the Second Reconstruction.

Trump’s neo-Confederate culture war is the symbolic cover for his full-scale political assault on those civil war amendments and the further enactment of their intent in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He is directing a second redemption to tear down the Second Reconstruction.

The attack on the constitution has been swift, comprehensive and sharply partisan. Trump is seeking to nullify birthright citizenship in the 14th amendment. He is challenging the Voting Rights Act and abandoning previous justice department positions on the constitutionality of remedying racially discriminatory voting maps in support of arguments in the supreme court case Louisiana v Callais.

In fear of losing Republican control of the Congress in the 2026 elections, he has encouraged states to ignore the practice of redistricting congressional districts based on the census and instead to redraw racially discriminatory lines to create new Republican seats.

The Smithsonian would do well to mount a proper exhibit dedicated to Trump’s historical ignorance

He has dismantled the civil rights division of the justice department. Seventy per cent of its attorneys have been fired or driven to resign. His administration has planned to close the Community Relations Service, a unit created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to mediate racial tensions. He has withdrawn from numerous justice department lawsuits challenging voter suppression laws.

He has issued an executive order to prevent federal agencies from enforcing regulations forbidding “disparate impact” discrimination. He has attacked grants, contracts and programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), with his justice department creating an Orwellian-named “civil rights fraud initiative” to target what his agents choose to define as illegal DEI practices, and use it to leverage control over universities, law firms and private businesses.

Perhaps no official presidential statement exemplifies Trump’s adherence to the “lost cause” mythology more flagrantly than his veto of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020, which included the creation of the National Naming Commission to remove names honoring the Confederacy from nine federal military forts and thousands of other assets. “I have been clear in my opposition to politically motivated attempts like this to wash away history and to dishonor the immense progress our country has fought for in realizing our founding principles,” Trump stated. The House and the Senate overwhelmingly overrode his veto.

Once Trump reassumed office, he authorized wiping away the new names, some of them of Black soldiers, and reinstated the old last names of Confederate generals at the forts but with the cynical twist of claiming they were really for different people with the same names.

The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who called the National Naming Commission “woke lemmings” and its changes “garbage”, said: “Unlike the left, we recognize our history, we don’t erase it.” He announced the return of the Confederate memorial at the Arlington national cemetery, whose frieze depicts a faithful enslaved woman taking care of a Confederate soldier’s child as he marches off to battle. In the West Point library, the Pentagon has rehung the 20ft-tall portrait of Robert E Lee in his gray Confederate uniform with a faithful enslaved person tending his horse, Traveller, in the background.

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Trump’s vision of restored “Americanism” might be found in the preserved “lost cause” wing of the Virginia Museum of History in Richmond, an exhibit originally constructed in 1921 by the Confederate Memorial Association, with huge murals of Lee and Stonewall Jackson as gallant cavaliers. The eulogizing of “the Four Seasons of the Confederacy” is now reframed with contemporary texts to explain the post-civil war romanticizing of the slave republic.

The exhibit also features a widely circulated “lost cause” pamphlet published by the United Confederate Veterans in 1919 that urged southern school districts: “Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves … Reject a book that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis.”

For perspective, around the corner from this exhibit, the Virginia Museum of History has stationed the white hood and sheet of a Ku Klux Klansman. In 2020 and 2021, the row of five towering Confederate statues along Richmond’s Monument Avenue of Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, and Matthew Fontaine Maury, erected as “lost cause” icons during the Jim Crow era, were removed.

In the interest of “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, the Smithsonian would do well to mount a proper exhibit dedicated to Trump’s historical ignorance and his “divisive race-centered ideology”.

The exhibit could begin with a kind of preface, posting the remarks of Trump’s chief of staff in his first administration, the former marine general John Kelly, who revealed Trump to be the ignoramus-in-chief. “He doesn’t know any history at all, even some of the basics on the US,” Kelly said. Trump reportedly told Kelly that Adolf Hitler “did a lot of good things”. He also reportedly said he needed “the kind of generals that Hitler had”, people “who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders”. (Trump representatives deny he made the remarks.)

Kelly described the conversation to Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic: “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” Kelly asked. “‘Do you mean the Kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’” Trump asked Kelly who the “good guys” were in the first world war.

Then the exhibit might move on to President William McKinley, whom Trump lately has invoked as the “tariff king” to justify his own tariffs, largely ruled illegal so far by the courts. Trump seems to care about no other aspect of McKinley or his presidency – say, the Spanish-American War – while he has revived his memory by removing the Native American name of Mount Denali in Alaska and renaming it Mount McKinley. Trump has ignored McKinley’s second thoughts about tariffs, including his final speech before his assassination in 1901, in which he abjured severe tariffs. But how would Trump know that?

Next the exhibit would devote ample space to Trump’s relationship to Abraham Lincoln, the one president Trump has discussed more than any other. In 2018, as Trump’s poll ratings dived, he tweeted: “Wow, highest Poll Numbers in the history of the Republican Party. That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.” Of course, there were no polls in Lincoln’s time.

In 2019, Trump stated: “The radical Democrats want to destroy America as we know it … Abraham Lincoln could not win Texas under those circumstances.” In fact, Lincoln’s name was kept off the ballot in Texas in the 1860 election and, of course, in 1864 when Texas was part of the Confederacy. In 2020, staging an interview with Fox News within the Lincoln Memorial, Trump used Lincoln as a prop to elevate himself as a greater martyr. “They always said, ‘Lincoln, nobody got treated worse than Lincoln.’ I believe I am treated worse.” He apparently had forgotten Lincoln’s assassination.

On the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, in 2024, he appeared to blame Lincoln for the civil war. “So many mistakes were made,” Trump said. “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 … Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.” Of course, Lincoln held out an olive branch in his first inaugural address, appealing to the “mystic chords of memory” and “the better angels of our nature”, which was met a month later with the firing on Fort Sumter. But in Trump’s view he had failed the art of the deal. He was the 19th century’s Zelenskyy.

Then the exhibit would come to Robert E Lee. In the aftermath of the neo-Nazi rally at Charlottesville in 2017 in which 35 people were injured and a young woman was murdered, about which Trump infamously said there were “some very fine people on both sides”, he defended Confederate monuments against a protest to remove a statue of Lee that had been erected as a tribute to the “lost cause”. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” he tweeted.

“So,” he said at a rally in 2018, “Robert E Lee was a great general and Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia, he couldn’t beat Robert E Lee. He was going crazy … but Robert E Lee was winning battle after battle after battle and Abraham Lincoln came home and he said, ‘I can’t beat Robert E Lee.’”

Lincoln had a clear and firm opinion about Lee. He considered him a traitor. Naming Lee high among officers of the army who had betrayed their oath to the United States, Lincoln wrote on 12 June 1863 that they were “now occupying the very highest places in the rebel war service, were all within the power of the government since the rebellion began, and were nearly as well known to be traitors then as now”. Lincoln wrote: “I think the time not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed” for not having arrested Lee and the others when their treasonous intent was known before they had joined the Confederacy to lead an armed insurrection against the United States.

Of course, there is a memorial on the estate overlooking Washington where Lee lived before the war. Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who had been a West Point classmate and friend of Lee, declared those grounds the Arlington national cemetery in 1864, planting the first graves of fallen soldiers in the rose garden as close to the house as possible, to ensure that Lee would never return.