“Error 404”. This is the famous error message that appears on screenshots of the White House website shared by many Internet users since Donald Trump's inauguration on Monday. According to these publications which have been agitating social networks for several days, it is the American Constitution which was previously on this page, and which would therefore have been removed.
This is, for example, what is stated in a post in English viewed more than two million times on X: “The American Constitution has been deleted from the White House website. » After checking, it actually turns out that the page corresponding to “the Constitution” on the White House website displays an error message.
No longer accessible on the White House website, but still on other government sites
As can be seen from the site's extensive online archives (like here), the page was still online on January 20, but was deleted the next day. In reality, it did not strictly speaking contain the text of the American Constitution, but was rather an explanatory page of what this text is, its role and its history. At the bottom of the page, there was a link to the full text on the US government archives website.
This page is still accessible online. In the same way as several others on government sites which allow you to consult the country's Constitution. This is the case of the American Senate site, or the text analysis and explanation site called Constitution Annotated.
“Edit and refine the White House website”
Why such a decision? A White House press officer provided some response to USA Today media: “We are in the process of developing, editing and refining the White House website. As part of this ongoing work, some content archived on the site has become inactive. We undertake to provide this content as quickly as possible. »
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The page dedicated to the Constitution is not the only one that is no longer accessible since the arrival of the Trump administration. This is also the case for the Spanish version of the site (archived here), and its associated social networks. As the Associated Press recalls, Trump's teams had already deleted this page during his first term in 2017, pledging to restore it. Which they had not done, since the page had been put back online in 2021 by Joe Biden.
During Donald Trump's first term, pages concerning the rights of LGBT people were also removed, as reported by Washington Post.
