As the transition team for newly-inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump took over affairs in the White House in January 2025, people on the internet began to claim that the White House website page where the U.S. Constitution appeared had been removed. According to them, the new administration had removed it.
For example, someone posted screenshots of the page before and after the new administration took over, implying that the removal was ominous. This post appeared on X on Jan. 21, 2025, the day after the inauguration (archived):
Pic 1: The White House website before Trump.
Pic 2: The White House website after Trump.
Yes, the White House did remove the US Constitution from their website today.
More foreshadowing on what's to come. pic.twitter.com/Q8VdNQxZlR— Joshua Reed Eakle ? (@JoshEakle) January 21, 2025
The post had received 42,500 views and 1,400 likes as of this writing. But the claim also appeared on other social media platforms, including BlueSky, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.
Indeed, a comparison of the web address of said page as of this writing (archived) with an archive of it made on Jan. 3, 2025 revealed that The Constitution had been removed:
(whitehouse.gov / screenshot)
(Internet Archive / White House / Screenshot)
However, this change may not have been as nefarious as some suggested. In fact, several pages on the White House website had been taken down, including its Spanish version, biographies of former presidents, the page on tourism, the one on equity, and others.
According to reporting by USA Today, this was not a definitive state of affairs. The news outlet quoted people in Trump's team as saying that the multiple "404 Error: Page Not Found" messages were a result of changes they were making to the site. For example, White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields told the outlet:
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.
We contacted the White House press team to ask for details about these changes and will update this report should they respond.