Rachel Maddow gleeful as courts deliver Presidents' Day 'present' smacking down Trump

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Rachel was great last night

Rachel Maddow gleeful as courts deliver Presidents' Day 'present' smacking down Trump

www.rawstory.com/rachel-maddo...

— (@diane52a.bsky.social) 2026-02-17T13:23:18.331Z

https://www.rawstory.com/rachel-maddow-2675274241/

MS NOW's Rachel Maddow kicked off her Monday night show with a victory lap after a federal court ruled against President Donald Trump's efforts to censor and remove exhibits about slavery from the site of the first presidential house at Independence Park in Philadelphia.

"That house has a really interesting story," explained Maddow. "Accidentally, the last remaining walls of that house were, by accident, torn down in the 1950s. That was the last standing portion of the house. It was accidentally demolished in the 1950s. Decades later, once archeologists and historians figured out for sure where that president's house had been, the city got involved. They bought the land, they preserved everything they could. And ultimately, that site was reopened as a national historic site. Today, it is sort of an open-air pavilion where you can see the shape of the president's house. You can see the foundations of the original building. They've got artifacts there from the time that George Washington and John Adams lived in that house.".....

She continued to quote from the judge's ruling: "President Washington’s house would not merit designation as a historic site if he had not commanded the army that won the Revolutionary War, whose presence presiding over the Constitutional Convention graced it with the gravitas and spirit necessary to the creation of our government’s foundational document, and his restraint and modesty radiated strength and wisdom that defines the ideal chief executive to this day. The government can convey a different message without restraint elsewhere if it so pleases, but it cannot do so to the President's House until it follows the law and consults with the City. The motion for preliminary injunction will be granted."

"Happy Presidents' Day, Philadelphia," she added. "You are getting your history put back up by court order at the President's House."

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1. Deadline Legal Blog-Judge cites Orwell in rejecting Trump's bid to erase history of slavery in Philadelphia

The Trump administration’s moves to rewrite history are meeting resistance in the courts.

Judge cites Orwell in rejecting Trump’s bid to erase history of slavery in Philadelphia - MS NOW apple.news/A7w5tpJCjQZK...

— (@bishopcharles.bsky.social) 2026-02-17T18:56:08.767Z

https://www.ms.now/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/philadelphia-slavery-history-display-judge-orwell

Trying to erase history is a theme of Donald Trump’s second term.

But his administration’s revisionist moves hit a snag on Monday. That’s when a federal judge ruled that the city of Philadelphia is likely to win its lawsuit against the administration’s attempt to whitewash George Washington’s slave-owning history at the President’s House Site, a location in the city that commemorates the first official presidential residence.

The suit was sparked by the National Park Service’s removal last month of educational panels and accompanying videos that discussed slavery. The city moved for a preliminary injunction to restore the exhibit.

Granting the motion on Presidents Day, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe wrote that the federal government “claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control.” The George W. Bush appointee wrote that those claims “echo Big Brother’s domain in [George] Orwell’s 1984,” specifically the dystopian novel’s government Records Department.

Turning to the present day, Rufe wrote, “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten.” But a government agency “cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it,” she wrote in support of her conclusion that the city will likely win its claims that the removal was “arbitrary and capricious.”

And though Rufe’s preliminary ruling isn’t the final word in the litigation, it’s just one example of the resistance that the administration’s efforts to rewrite history is meeting in the courts.

On Tuesday, a coalition of groups filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts that seeks to require the federal government “to cease all unlawful efforts to remove up-to-date and accurate historical or scientific information from the national parks” and to restore interpretative materials that have been removed.

The suit cited the Philadelphia erasure as among the litany of revisionist moves, writing in Tuesday’s complaint that the government campaign “escalated in recent weeks, as the National Park Service, implementing an order of the Secretary of the Interior, tore down the exhibit in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park memorializing the legacy of people enslaved by the country’s first President; ripped away signage detailing climate threats at Fort Sumter, one of the country’s most environmentally endangered parks; and wiped away descriptions of history and science at countless national parks throughout the United States.”

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