I admit to being less than enthusiastic about Donald Trump’s March 27, 2025, executive order that aimed to eliminate content that presents American history as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed” and that promotes what the order describes as “divisive race-centered ideology.”
Removing most references to Trump's impeachments throughout the museum complex only reinforced my skepticism. That didn't bother me as much as the overzealousness of the administration personnel responsible for carrying out the executive order, who began dismantling exhibits that helped tell our story, warts and all.
This was inevitable. The same thing happened when schools began to dismantle coursework that was considered "woke" by conservatives, when some of it was a simple retelling of the facts. Give ideologues the power, and some of the good is certain to be washed away with the bad.
There simply is no way to tell the story of slavery without talking about racism. There's no way to talk about the horror of slavery without making some white people look bad. And there's no way to talk about the proximate causes of the Civil War without talking about Southern attitudes toward slavery and how their racism led them to fight rather than risk losing their "property."
There's also no way to talk about the Hispanic experience in America without pointing to the Mexican-American War as essentially a war of conquest. Why these things can't be told along with the rest of our glorious history is something that I've never understood.
However, it's not so much the individual exhibits that matter. This is an institutional problem, and Trump was 100% right to go to war to save the continuity of American history and heritage from those whose primary objective is to tear it down.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” the president wrote in August in a Truth Social post.
“We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made,” he added. “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE.”
Recent outrages at the Smithsonian include deliberate use of the institution to “legitimize” the 1619 Project, wall texts that push ideologies on “settler colonialism” and “systemic racism,” and the collection of trash and paraphernalia from the BLM riots as art.
It’s in the face of such curatorial policies that the Trump administration has decided that the Smithsonian urgently needs an about-face, especially considering the 250th anniversary of America’s founding in July, and has argued that American continuity depends on this reversal. It has warned it in its National Security Strategy that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure,” and is acting to prevent such erasure at home, too.
Indeed, Western European nations indulged their self-flagellating leftists and have totally altered their national narratives. Their glorious achievements in the arts, technology, medicine, and the Enlightenment have been twisted beyond recognition by bitter, ignorant people.
Trump is trying to make sure that doesn't happen in the U.S., but it's gong to be an uphill battle.
In August, Trump ordered the Smithsonian, "demanding documentation on content from current and future exhibitions, 250th-anniversary planning, educational materials, and indexing of permanent collections from its top-eight museums," according to UnHerd. Brazenly, the Smithsonian stalled for time, refusing to comply with the order from the president, not only dragging their feet but only partially fulfilling requests from the White House.
This led to a December letter from the White House demanding that the Smithsonian comply with the president's orders by January 13, 2026.
The institution’s positioning to date can easily be gleaned from an opinion column that ran in August in The New York Times. Former Times editorial board member David Firestone, wrote, approvingly, of a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, that “it’s impossible to leave its magnificent building on the National Mall without feeling shamed and haunted.” Much of the museum’s collection, he added, “is a rebuke to the notion of American exceptionalism, explaining that the United States became a global economic power by enslaving Africans.” Other Smithsonian museums performed the same function, he said. “The Portrait Gallery now has labels on many of its paintings of prominent early Americans that show how many people they enslaved…. And there is no harm in accepting that shame.”
The museum claims "that the “the race-based system of slavery was fundamental to the founding of the United States,” that “the national economy relied upon slavery,” and that “profits from the sale of enslaved humans and their labor laid the economic foundation for Western Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas.”
That's the "1619 Project" on steroids.
These are misconceptions propagated by the 1619 Project’s gross overestimation of the value of cotton to the US economy in the first half of the 19th century. As historians, including Leftist and liberal ones, have explained, the 1619 Project relied on the work of the Cornell academic Edward Baptist, who wrongly miscounted, and “with a wave of his wand” multiplied by a factor of 10 cotton’s share of the economy in 1836, from 5% to “almost half of the economic activity of the United States.” Historian Phillip Magness, who has also analyzed the numbers, has argued that the exaggeration of cotton’s impact has been intended to serve the political purpose of anti-capitalism.
The last straw was the Smithsonian sending curators to the sites of Black Lives Matter riots to collect "art" for exhibits. The Smithsonian's secretary at the time, Lonnie Bunch III, was all for it.
Everywhere BLM rioted, Bunch sent his specialists to collect the paraphernalia the rioters had declined to put in garbage bins and left behind to litter our streets. Or, to put it another way, the head of our main national museums embarked on a mission to record the trashing of America, both literally and figuratively, so he could transmit it to future generations.
"Bunch was essentially forcing a national institution to join an insurrection against that nation," says UnHerd. That may be an exaggeration, but Bunch's inappropriate actions should be called out.
All the Smithsonian institutions have succumbed to the woke virus under Bunch. Many exhibits at the National Museum of American History seem intended also to make Americans feel ashamed — of ill treatment of immigrants, of the unequal rewards of capitalism, of westward expansion, take your pick — and none makes you feel proud of an American story that the historian Paul Johnson described as “one of human achievement without parallel.”
Trump's war on the Smithsonian is not over. The left has yet to unleash lawfare on Trump's project, getting the courts involved in what is American history and what isn't.
But if that's what it takes to cleanse the woke stain from our history, so be it.
