Donald Trump took power on Monday as the 47th President of the United States, quickly issuing a flurry of clearly illegal executive orders and making changes to the social media accounts and websites controlled by the office of the president. Arguably one of the most shocking changes to the president’s web footprint involves the U.S. Constitution. Anyone who now googles the Constitution and follows the link to the White House website currently sees a 404 error.
Before Jan. 20, 2025, the White House website featured a page that described the Constitution and the history of how it was ratified. The site, as it appeared during Joe Biden’s presidency, is available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and shows a page about the White House that featured four pages that visitors could navigate to, including Presidents, First Families, The Grounds, and Our Government.
Clicking on Our Government brought visitors to a page explaining the U.S. system, including the judicial, executive, and legislative branch “whose powers are vested in the U.S. Constitution.” That mention of the U.S. Constitution included a hyperlink that brought people to the page that now delivers a 404 error. The disappearance of the page has gone viral on Instagram, thanks to liberal influencer Mercedes Chandler, and it should be noted that the text on all of these pages was non-partisan and reads like anything you might encounter in a middle school textbook about government.
“Can someone from the MAGA movement please enlighten me how the party who claims to care about the Constitution took it down from the website?” Chandler said. “Is this because you don’t want us to know what’s in it?”
Chandler went on to speculate that it might be tied to the fact that Trump issued an executive order on Monday to no longer recognize the concept of birthright citizenship in the U.S., something that’s been guaranteed by the 14th Amendment since it was ratified in the 19th century after the Civil War. Attorneys General from 18 states sued the federal government on Tuesday over the executive order, given its crystal clear violation of the Constitution.
Obviously, any kind of major changes to a website can break all kinds of links. Maybe the Trump White House just put information about the Constitution someplace else? If that’s the case, we can’t find it.
Scrolling down to the bottom of the main page for whitehouse.gov features a section titled “About the White House.” There are three main buttons to click there, including The White House, Camp David, and Air Force One. But clicking on any of those pages doesn’t show you any information about the U.S. Constitution. In fact, we couldn’t find a single mention of the word “Constitution” anywhere on the White House website anymore outside of news releases, which is odd.
The Trump administration made other changes to the websites controlled by the federal government on Monday, including the fact that it deleted the website reproductiverights.gov. The site was launched in 2022 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Biden to give Americans information about birth control and abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court abolished abortion rights at the federal level in a landmark case called Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The reproductive rights website told Americans that employers were required to cover access to health care services like birth control under the Affordable Care Act, a fact that is currently being challenged in court. The reproductiverights.gov site is also archived by the Wayback Machine.
Other social media accounts controlled by the White House also made the switch midday on Monday, including those for X, Facebook, and even lesser-known sites like Flickr. And while few Americans are checking Flickr these days (and Trump’s people haven’t posted any new photos there yet) the lesser-known sites can actually be an interesting place where news accidentally breaks. For instance, we wouldn’t have this photo of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shaking Donald Trump’s hand in the fall of 2019, if the White House photographer hadn’t released it through Flickr.
Stay safe out there, folks. It’s going to get much, much worse for Americans before it gets any better.
Read the full article here
