MUSEUM PIECE

Trump’s Smithsonian Crackdown Could Be Its Best Promotion Yet

Trump’s effort to dumb down history and shave off the rough spots is not what we, the people, want.

Opinion

Another D.C. institution in the culture war crosshairs. The Smithsonian has been a target of the Trump administration for over a year now, since an executive order in March 2025 put Vice President JD Vance in charge of “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” and eliminating “divisive race-centered ideology.”

Republicans are scapegoating Anthea Hartig, director of the Smithsonian’s history museum, who faced hostile questions from lawmakers about an exhibit on girlhood which dared to include a transgender girl, and for sullying Benjamin Franklin’s reputation by suggesting that, in addition to family and friends, he might have used “indentured servants and enslaved people in his household” to test his experiments, “although we may never know for certain.”

The first woman to lead the history museum, Hartig refused to apologize for any of the exhibits she oversaw and denied she is trying to “rewrite history” during a contentious congressional hearing. She said the museum’s focus is “scholarship, accuracy, independence and nonpartisanship,” and that it does not take sides in America’s political debates.

She said at least half a dozen times, “I love this country unconditionally.”

None of it mattered. Just days later, Trump ordered the National Park Service to place signs along sidewalks and walkways leading to the history museum warning the public about the danger of “Ideological Capture.” A 162-page report issued by the White House on July 4 accused the museum’s leadership of engaging in “anti-White activism,” “illegal alien activism,” and “transgender activism.”

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Trump cut to the chase in a Truth Social post, declaring of the museum that there’s too much about “how bad Slavery was,” he wrote. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

(As the New York Times has reported, Trump’s State Department this week unveiled the exhibit “Passport to Patriotism” in honor of America’s semiquincentennial. “We don’t need professional revisionists to dictate our nation’s history to us; we all know what our flag stands for, who our founding fathers are, and the exhibition will speak for itself,” a State Department spokesperson told the Times.)

True, the Smithsonian has worked hard to include everybody in America’s story. And for those who prefer a literal ‘whitewashing’ of that story, it’s bound to be disappointing. Still, the top exhibits at the history museum include the original copy of the “Star Spangled Banner,” Thomas Jefferson’s desk, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Mister Rogers’ sweater, and a collection of protest signs—not one of them being anti-Trump. What’s there not to like?

The administration’s reaction is “very reflexive and very uneducated,” Rebeccah Miller, executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, told the Daily Beast. (The all-volunteer organization is focused on protecting historic buildings and sites through advocacy and education.) “The Smithsonian has done a very good job presenting information… They’ve covered all the historical sites to celebrate the collective history of the U.S. and not just one demographic.”

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Hartig’s obvious unease before a panel of Republicans thirsty for elite, academic blood is similar to what the presidents of Columbia and Harvard faced last year when they testified about antisemitism on their campuses. That didn’t end well for them.

And if the past is prologue, Hartig’s job is likely on the line along with her boss, Lonnie Bunch, the current Secretary of the Smithsonian—and the first Black man to hold the position. He helped create and then led the African-American museum before being named to the top job. He now walks a tightrope Trump is jiggling, maintaining that the American experience is being portrayed by the Smithsonian fairly and fully, while saying there’s always room for improvement.

We don’t know yet what the Park Service signs will say, but they’re expected to warn visitors about “inaccurate information.” (The Parks Service did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.) At the same time, this kind of spectacle is likely to heighten interest in the work that’s being critiqued. The Smithsonian museums, and there are 21 of them plus the National Zoo, don’t lack for visitors to begin with, and surely just as tourists now get their picture taken with National Guardsmen and women still patrolling D.C., a photo next to a sign warning of the dangers of pink “Latina Power” baseball caps will be the money shot for visitors wanting to show they braved the political storm. And admission is free!

“Whenever you really try and tell people what they should know about, that’s when it backfires. People become more interested in the information you’re trying to censor,” added Miller.

Angelo Villagomez, a Senior Fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, labeled Bunch and Hartig heroes. “The reason these signs are going up is they haven’t rolled over,” he told the Daily Beast. They’re not fighting out loud, but they’re holding their own—and that’s good for now.

“The same people who are complaining about historical references in the “Odyssey” blockbuster movie don’t want to see Black people in our history or on our theater screens or on our public lands,” he said, noting that a third of the exhibits on public lands across the country have been flagged for amending or removal because they mention Black History, Indigenous people, or science.

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At the White House Visitors Center, an exhibit was flagged for noting President Warren Harding served cocktails during Prohibition. At Fort Sumter, a sign was removed for saying rising sea levels threatened the historic site. At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia—steps from where the Declaration of Independence was signed—a sign detailing the nine enslaved people George Washington brought from Mount Vernon to serve at the President’s House Site was removed, erasing from public view the lives of people who made his presidency possible. At Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana, language describing how American Indian boarding schools “violently erased cultural identities and language in the children they were entrusted to educate” was flagged for revision. The Northern Cheyenne Tribe had specifically requested this language and is opposed to its changing. I could go on, and on.

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“The reason we are studying history is to help us understand today,” Villagomez concluded. Build it, and they will come is a common history lesson; in this case, it might better be said, tear it down and people will come. Unlike the Kennedy Center, which Trump has destroyed and now stands almost vacant from neglect, the Smithsonian is at a crossroads where it can still turn back the worst of Trump’s instincts. It has the power of a product that is seen by visitors from across the country who can decide for themselves who’s telling the truth about a changing world.

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