Donald Trump threatened to pull federal funding from California schools, if an investigation by the US Department of Education concludes that the New York Times’ 1619 Project has been implemented into their curriculums. "Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded!" Trump tweeted Sunday in response to a tweet about the project being added to curriculums.
The 1619 Project is named after the year that the first group of enslaved Africans arrived on America's shores via ship. It completely reframes U.S. history currently taught in schools, which asserts that the country began in 1776/
Trump's tweet appears to be an extension of the Saving American History Act of 2020 introduced in July by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, which “would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 or school districts.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist behind the 1619 Project, responded to Trump’s tweet by questioning why the RNC can be critical of the left’s so-called over-reliance on cancel culture but the right can’t see when their political figures are doing the same.
On Friday, in another sign that Trump is unwilling to engage with the country's troubled racial past, he instructed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity training related to white privilege and critical race theory, calling it “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”
