The White House website underwent significant changes this week as President Donald Trump‘s team took over, removing web pages featuring the country’s founding documents including the Constitution and the previous administration’s views.
The homepage now displays a silhouette of Trump and a bold message, “AMERICA IS BACK,” along with links to presidential statements, remarks, and newly signed executive orders.
However, regular visitors noticed significant omissions from the updated website: sections about the Constitution and Bill of Rights were absent, along with pages about tourism, equity, internships and information regarding former presidents from both parties.
Bio pages for former US presidents, including Republicans Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, as well as Democrats Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, returned error messages.
USA Today also reported that the Spanish-language version of the White House site also displayed a 404-error, indicating that the page could not be found. The White House stated that the errors were unintended and temporary, attributing them to the ongoing development, editing, and tweaking of the website during the transition.
People reacted to the error message with confusion and concerns. Hinting at a grim future president of “Project Liberal” said on X, “Yes, the White House did remove the US Constitution from their website today. More foreshadowing on what’s to come.” “this is serious,” said another X user.
Another person chimed in on the concerns with, “what do you MEAN the constitution isn’t available on the white house website anymore,” while a writer (according to her X bio) warned, “If you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention.”
Amid the rising concerns, principal White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields responded, “It’s day two. We are in the process of developing, editing and tweaking the White House website. As part of this ongoing work, some of the archived content on the website went dormant. We are committed to reloading that content in a short timeline.”
The administration requested patience as it builds out the new White House website and affirmed its commitment to bringing back the Spanish translation section of the site. This is not the first time a new administration has made changes to the White House website; when Trump entered the White House in 2017, his team removed pages about LGBTQ+ rights and climate change.
