Trump asked Americans to help him whitewash national parks. They revolted instead

The DOI placed QR codes in national parks, inviting visitors to report content deemed ‘negative about either past or living Americans’. Instead, it became a mode of resistanceOver the past year and a half, Donald Trump and his administration have launched a campaign to censor American history at US national parks and federal lands.As part of Executive Order 14253, “Restoring truth and sanity to American history”, the Department of Interior (DOI) ordered park rangers to review all signs, brochures, books and films for content that “inappropriately disparages” Americans by suggesting that the United States was “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive”. It’s resulted in dozens of sign removals across the US, most of them related to slavery, Indigenous history and the climate crisis.The DOI also placed notices throughout parks inviting visitors to participate in this history-rewriting campaign, asking them to report, via QR codes, “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features”.Instead, these QR code entries became a mode of resistance for many park visitors who used them as a way to tell the Trump administration that they don’t agree with how they’re reshaping national parks.Park visitors submitted more than 35,000 comments between June 2025 and January 2026. The Guardian accessed this trove of responses after groups including the Sierra Club and the National Parks Conservation Association filed a Freedom of Information Act request for it. We analyzed these comments and found that at least 19,000 of them – more than half – expressed support for the parks or opposition to the administration’s censorship campaign.Here is some of what they had to say …The Guardian also identified several themes in comments pushing back against the Trump administration’s censorship campaign, including … Illustration: Guardian DesignThe Guardian’s Deleted data series explores how critical US government information is being deleted and what the consequences will be, and will preserve or recreate lost datasets. If you know about any datasets, webpages or government materials that have been deleted or altered in the past year, or are willing to share how those changes affect you, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out at deleted-data@theguardian.com.