President Donald Trump’s administration has installed its own version of history at the President’s House, swapping storied panels on the brutality of slaveryat the site for displays that experts say sanitize George Washington’s role as an enslaver.
The replacement caps a monthslong legal battle that was the first direct skirmish between Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and the Trump administration, over the site on Independence Mall.
The change happened overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, hours after the city hosted MLB All-Star game events near the site, allowing the government to switch out the displays and shutdown the television screens while avoiding public scrutiny during the takedown.
As of Wednesday morning, about a dozen U.S. Park Police were roaming around the site. The Park Police are typically stationed in Washington D.C., New York City, and the San Francisco, but were present for Tuesday’s All-Star festivities.
The overhaul of the President’s House exhibit, which memorializes the nine people Washington enslaved at his Philadelphia residence, comes a little more than a week after the city celebrated the United States’ 250th birthday on July Fourth and tourists from around the world saw an incomplete version of history as the exhibit hung in limbo.
On July 3, the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit gave the Trump administration the final go-ahead to replace the panels.
The city argued in that the court violated federal rules by not giving the city time to respond and attacked last month’s Third Circuit’s ruling paving the way for the new panels as too broad. But the court denied all the city’s requests.
The drastic alterations are a culmination of about a year of turmoil since the Trump administration began scrutinizing the site last year as part of the president’s executive order to review or remove content at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
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In January, the administration abruptly removed of all the exhibits at the President’s House, provoking a legal battle waged by the City of Philadelphia and non-stop advocacy from stakeholders who helped develop the President’s House in the early 2000s.
Removals also happened at national parks around the country.
The installation of the new exhibit marks the end of a phase in the city’s legal battle against Trump’s administration, the first of his second term.
The city sued in January when the slavery exhibit was abruptly dismantled, asking a judge to issue an injunction ordering the panels be restored. Judge Cynthia M. Rufe issued a blistering opinion on Presidents Day ordering the restoration, comparing the Trump administration’s action to the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s 1984 novel.
The administration installed roughly half of the removed panels before Rufe’s deadline, but left the site’s walls half bare after appealing to the Third Circuit and securing an administrative stay.
A unanimous Third Circuit three-judge panel — which included Trump, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama appointees — held in June that the city had no rights over the exhibit after having donated the President’s House to the National Park Service.
No changes followed on the ground after the ruling because of litigation in federal court in Boston that challenged the legality of display removals in national parks and historic sites nationwide, leading a district judge to order the Trump administration to restore all removed items.
But on July 2, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stayed that order, clearing the final legal obstacle preventing the federal government from installing the new panels.
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