Soon after the new administration arrived, things began to go missing from the White House website. They weren’t just the partisan policy platforms that typically disappear during a presidential transition. Informational pages about the Constitution and past presidents, up in various forms since President George W. Bush was in office, all vanished. Thousands of other government web pages had also been taken down or modified, including content about vaccines, hate crimes, low-income children, opioid addiction and veterans, before a court order temporarily blocked part of the sweeping erasure. A Justice Department database tracking criminal charges and convictions linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was removed. Segments of data sets are gone, some of the experts who produced them were dismissed, and many mentions of words like “Black,” “women” and “discrimination” have evaporated. President Trump’s team is selectively stripping away the public record, reconstructing his preferred vision of America in the negative space of purged history, archivists and historians said. As data and resources are deleted or altered, something foundational is also at risk: Americans’ ability to access and evaluate their past, and with it, their already shaky trust in facts. Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said on X that the disposal process was standard practice for old courtesy copies of paperwork that were largely backed up on classified computer systems. In an emailed statement, she did not address concerns about the removed records, but said that the president regularly communicated with news outlets and directly with the public and was “leading the most transparent administration in history.” The campaign of deletion does more than amplify the administration’s policy priorities — it buries evidence of the alternatives in a MAGA-branded memory hole. Several information experts said that Mr. Trump’s executive orders have authoritarian overtones, reminiscent of when Russia cloned Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, and stripped it of unflattering material. Information experts and civil rights groups fear that a historical vacuum could jeopardize accountability and breed mistrust, especially in an already hostile political environment for researchers who are trying to fight disinformation. Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said, “There are tectonic plates that are shifting, and it’s a new version of truth that is being portrayed, and that, I think, is the most profound danger we have ever faced as a country.” Even Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor called on Mr. Trump to “bring back our history” after the first American woman to legally vote was removed from the website for Arlington National Cemetery, along with a section on other notable women. References to transgender people disappeared from the National Park Service’s web page for the Stonewall National Monument. Mr. Trump is not known as an enthusiast of document preservation: Past employees have described his penchant for ripping up documents and flushing papers down the toilet. The restructuring effort led by Elon Musk through his Department of Government Efficiency tried to delete or obscure the mistakes before reversing course last month and adding more details that fact-checkers could use to confirm its claims about the savings it had achieved from canceling federal grants. The historical record, however, remains under intense pressure and not just from the government. Mr. Musk has a vendetta against Wikipedia, which the billionaire derided as “Wokepedia” last year. He called the encyclopedia, which is written and edited by volunteers from the general public, “an extension of legacy media propaganda” after an entry described a gesture he had made during Mr. Trump’s recent inauguration as being “compared to a Nazi salute.” The Department of Government Efficiency, which had been caught in a series of high-profile errors, tried to delete or obscure the mistakes before reversing course last month and adding more details that fact-checkers could use to confirm its claims about the savings it had achieved from canceling federal grants.
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