MAPA: Make America Patriotic Again
Donald Trump has his interpretation. What's yours?
Upon his inauguration, President Trump issued an executive order saying how American history should be taught in schools. He asserted that instruction must “instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation… [with] a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history.1 The president had closed out his previous term with an order that denounced teaching that doesn’t “properly honor and recollect the great legacy of the American national experience—our country's valiant and successful effort to shake off the curse of slavery and to use the lessons of that struggle to guide our work toward equal rights for all citizens in the present.”2
This year’s order required all students to have such a “patriotic” lesson about the Constitution next week, on the September 17 anniversary of its signing at the 1787 Constitutional Convention.3
The mandate is a chance for teachers to explain true patriotism that includes not only celebrating the nation’s virtues but also an obligation to correct its many continuing, and perhaps growing flaws. It’s unlikely that the government will actually withhold funds from schools whose teachers dispute the president’s version of patriotism—that the country is on a continuous path to perfection—but if it does punish schools, teachers who defied him could express public pride in having done so. And the rest of us can support those teachers’ and their districts’ efforts.
Trump also re-established a “1776 Commission” to recommend teaching methods to implement his version of patriotism. He appointed the president of Hillsdale College in Michigan as commission chair and the dean of its graduate school of government as its director.4 Trump initially created the group in the waning days of his first term, but President Biden disbanded it. During the next few years, Hillsdale College continued its work and began to publish its “Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum” in 2021.
Trump’s choice of Hillsdale College to recommend lesson plans for American schools is hypocritical. He has cancelled research funds to universities like Harvard, with claims that their professors are too uniformly liberal: He falsely insists that the government has a legal right to force colleges to be more ideologically diverse by hiring more professors with conservative biases. No doubt, places like Harvard have more liberal than conservative teachers, but Harvard is a private institution, free to hire as it sees fit. And whatever its professors say in classrooms or in public, Harvard does not proclaim that its institutional mission is to promote leftist ideas.
In contrast, Hillsdale College has a political mission. As an institution, it served on the Advisory Board of “Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation’s program that designed right-wing policies for the Trump Administration.5 Of the 80 organizations identified as “conservative” on the board, Hillsdale was the only college or university. Hillsdale’s graduate school describes its mission as teaching students how to “restore” constitutional government in the United States.6 The final report of the Hillsdale-led 1776 commission, issued just days before the end of Trump’s first term, states that progressives have created
a fourth branch of government called at times the bureaucracy or the administrative state. This shadow government never faces elections and today operates largely without checks and balances. The founders always opposed government unaccountable to the people and without constitutional restraint, yet it continues to grow around us.7
The report criticizes slavery for resting on a “group right” of white plantation owners to have supreme power, articulated by John C. Calhoun, slavery’s most prominent defender. The Commission concludes that we still suffer from Calhoun’s notion and that efforts to redress systematic discrimination against African Americans are based on the same flawed group-rights theory that undergirded slaveholder supremacy. Claiming that the Constitution protects only individual rights, the Commission then denounced all efforts to remedy past harms:
[T]he damage done by the denial of core American principles and by the attempted substitution of a theory of group rights in their place proved widespread and long-lasting. These, indeed, are the direct ancestors of some of the destructive theories that today divide our people and tear at the fabric of our country.8
A few of Trump’s complaints about how history is now taught were reasonable, although exaggerated. His supporters can find rare examples of teachers who try to make white students feel guilty about actions of ancestors who may have been slaveholders or willing residents of whites-only neighborhoods. But such guilt-preaching is rare in schools; most teachers recognize that no children are responsible for ‘sins of their fathers’; every American—white, black, and of every ethnicity—has a responsibility to build a more equitable society and to redress crimes of the past, no matter whose ancestors committed them.
Trump takes particular aim at the “1619 Project” and curriculum produced by the New York Times. As its title suggests (referring to the year slaves were first brought to American colonies), it over-stresses legacies of slavery to explain present-day inequality. Although the 1619 Project’s instructional material includes valuable information on America’s shameful Jim Crow practices after the Civil War, its focus on slavery invites a common conservative complaint: ‘That was 160 years ago! Surely there’s been time for African Americans to work hard, save, and pull themselves up to achieve equality with whites. If they’ve not, it’s nobody’s fault but their own.’ A balanced account shows that slavery’s legacies were almost entirely remedied by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, by civil rights laws passed soon after the Civil War, and by post-war Reconstruction programs that protected education, labor rights, and political opportunity for freed slaves. Today’s inequality results more from abandonment of Reconstruction in 1876, from the Supreme Court’s annihilation of the plain meaning and intent of those amendments and civil rights laws, from Jim Crow segregation rules and laws and the too-widespread use of lynching to enforce them, and from government policies during the New Deal and after to extend economic rights to white but not to black citizens. Were it not for these post-emancipation programs to enforce a racial caste system, we might have a racially egalitarian society today, or something approaching it, legacies of slavery notwithstanding.
But if the 1619 project overly emphasizes slavery, its imbalance pales in comparison to the 1776 curriculum’s downplaying of it. The Hillsdale curriculum refers to the Constitution’s clause that authorized the capture and return of escaped slaves. According to Hillsdale, because the text of the clause calls an escapee a “person held to service or labour,” not a slave, the terminology forced slaveowners to recognize their property’s humanity.9 No serious student of the slave economy could make such a claim.
One of the most controversial provisions of the Constitution is the “three-fifths clause” that added 3/5 of a state’s slaves to its population count for the purpose of Congressional representation, even though slaves could not vote for their congressmen. The clause ensured Southern domination of Congress. The Hillsdale Curriculum calls the clause a partial victory for non-slave states because Southerners would have preferred that slaves be fully counted. This is foolish. Students could reasonably conclude that if any slaves were counted to artificially boost slaveholders’ power, it was a defeat for the North, not a partial victory. The curriculum says that “[s]tudents need not agree with the tenets of the compromise, but they must understand it as the founders themselves understood it.”10
This is mis-education in two ways. First, the “founders” did not understand the compromise as necessary. More of them did than did not, which is why it was approved. Well-trained teachers help students learn how to decide whether they understand the decision as the majority or as the minority did. Second, and more important, expecting students to judge historical events only as most actors at the time did, validates everything that ever occurred in history and undermines an important reason we study it: to learn from mistakes of the past and to avoid making similar errors today.
Constitution Day lessons should contrast Trump’s one-sided patriotism with a balanced account of American history, which, like any nation’s, is complex.
Pupils should learn that George Washington knew slavery was wrong but retained hundreds of slaves, with his will providing for their freedom only upon his death. Students should also know that he refused to become a king by remaining president when his second term ended and thereby set a standard for democratic rule unique in world history.
Pupils should learn that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder. Students should also know about his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, with its insistence that all men are created equal, with rights that cannot lawfully be taken away (the rights were “unalienable”). His words inspired the abolitionist movement and motivated Abraham Lincoln to move more aggressively to end slavery than he otherwise might have done. The Hillsdale curriculum, as one reviewer observed, mentions Jefferson hundreds of times, but Sally Hemings, his enslaved concubine, never.11
American educators can do better than that.
Donald J. Trump. 2025. “Executive Order. Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” January 29.
Donald J. Trump. 2020. “Executive Order 13958—Establishing the President's Advisory 1776 Commission.” November 2.
Donald J. Trump. 2025. “Executive Order 14190. Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling. January 29.
President Trump has not yet announced whether the chair and executive director of the re-instituted 1776 Commission would be the same as those named in 2020, although his executive order required them to be appointed by last April. President of Hilldale College and chair of the original 1776 Commission was Larry P. Arnn. Dean of the Hillsdale Graduate School of Government and executive director of the original 1776 Commission was Matthew Spalding. The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. 2021. “The 1776 Report.” January. p. 41.
Project 2025’s website described its Advisory Board as a “coalition of conservative organizations.”
The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. 2021. “The 1776 Report.” January. p. 13.
The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. 2021. “The 1776 Report.” January. p. 12
Hillsdale College K-12 Curriculum, American History, Grades 9-12; Unit 2, “The American Founding” p. 36-37.
Hillsdale College K-12 Curriculum, American History, Grades 9-12; Unit 2, “The American Founding” p. 36.
Hochschild, Adam. 2023. “History Bright and Dark.” The New York Review of Books, May 25.
From the author: As originally published, this post failed to make explicit reference to lynching, part of the Jim Crow system, and publicly endorsed by Southern leaders, including Senators and advisors to the president, as a means of enforcing violations of Jim Crow rules. I believe, but am not certain, that statements by Southern leaders advocating lynching were proximate enough to actual lynching incidents that those statements were not protected under the free speech provisions of the First Amendment, and should have been prosecuted. The post will soon be updated to make explicit reference to lynching.
It cant be made great again because it never was. It needs to be abolished along with the capitalist class and replaced with a socialist system.