The United States Constitution offers a 404 Now

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 social media accounts and websites controlled by the president’s office . Arguably one of the most shocking changes to the president’s web footprint involves the US Constitution. Anyone who now Googles the Constitution and follows the link to the White House website currently sees a 404 error.

Before January 20, 2025, the White House website featured a page describing the Constitution and the history of how it was ratified. The site, as it appeared during the presidency of Joe Biden, is available on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and featured a page about the White House that featured four pages that visitors could browse, including Presidents, First Families, The Lands, and Our Government.

Click on Our Government took visitors to a page explaining the US system, including the judicial, executive and legislative branches “whose powers are vested in the US Constitution.” This mention of the US Constitution included a hyperlink that took people to the page that now provides a 404 error. The disappearance of the page went viral on Instagram, thanks to the liberal influencer Mercedes ChandlerAnd it should be noted that the text on all these pages was non-partisan and read like anything you might find in a middle school textbook on government.

“Someone from the MAGA movement, please explain to me how the party that claims to care about the Constitution took it off the website?” Chandler said. “Is that because you don’t want us to know what’s up?”

Chandler went on to speculate that it could be related to the fact that Trump issued an executive order on Monday to no longer recognize the concept of birthright citizenship in the United States, something that has been guaranteed by the 14th Amendment since when 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 flagrant 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 the information about the Constitution somewhere else? If that’s the case, we can’t find it.

Scrolling down to the bottom of the main page for whitehouse.gov presents a section titled “About the White House.” There are three main buttons to click here, including The White House, Camp David, and Air Force One. But clicking on any of these pages will not show you any information about the US Constitution. In fact, we can’t find a single mention of the word “Constitution” anywhere on the White House website outside of press releases, which is strange.

The Trump administration made other changes to federally controlled websites on Monday, including taking down the website. reproductiverights.gov. The site was launched in 2022 by the US Department of Health and Human Services under President Biden to give Americans information about birth control and abortion after the US Supreme Court abolished abortion rights at the federal level in a landmark case called Dobbs v Jackson Organization for Women’s Health. .

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 hosted by the Wayback Machine.

Other social media accounts controlled by the White House also made the switch at noon 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), lesser-known sites can actually be an interesting place where news accidentally spreads. For example, we won’t have this photo of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shaking Donald Trump’s hand fall of 2019If the White House photographer hadn’t released it through Flickr.

Stay safe out there, folks. He will get there much, much worse for Americans before it gets better.