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The Smithsonian hit back at the Trump administration late Monday, committing to be “free from political or partisan influence" as it refused

The Smithsonian hit back at the Trump administration late Monday, committing to be “free from political or partisan influence" as it refused to kowtow to the president's orders.

“Since its inception, the Smithsonian has set out to be a nonpartisan institution,” the museum's Board of Regents wrote. ‘As the nation’s museum, the Smithsonian must be a welcoming place of knowledge and discovery for all Americans.”

The museum's hit back followed an executive order that President Donald Trump issued to remove "improper ideology" from the Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo, accusing them of trying to rewrite American history on race and gender.

The Smithsonian has issued a statement supporting Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch following President Trump's claim that he fired the director of

#donald trump #second term #executive order #the smithsonian

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order on the Smithsonian Institution that targets funding to programs that contain what he ca

"Under Trump’s order, Vance will also work with the White House budget office to make sure future funding for the Smithsonian Institution isn’t spent on programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.” Trump also wants to ensure that the women’s history museum celebrates women and not “recognize men as women in any respect.”"

#yall I am not okay #this is bad #do not comply in advance #brace yourselves #the smithsonian #this is a marathon not a sprint #national museum of african american history and culture #museums #us politics #National Zoo #The Smithsonian Institution #history #lgbtqia history

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 27, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 28, 2026

On July 22, Sam Fortier of NOTUS reported that the Trump-appointed judges of the Presidential 1776 Award competition, emceed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, apparently rigged the competition to cut out a 17-year-old Indian immigrant in favor of a homeschooled blonde girl from Wyoming, a Michigan boy who attended a private Catholic school, and a girl from Washington who told CNN she supported Trump and wanted to see “everyone walking away from the competition knowing this is the greatest country of the world.”

In order to privilege white contestants over an immigrant, the judges apparently changed the acceptable answers to questions about our history.

This story mirrors the larger attempt of the Trump administration to rewrite the history of the United States. Trump officials reject our traditional understanding that the country was based on the ideas the Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence and that Americans from all walks of life have struggled ever since to make those principles come to life.

In place of that historic understanding, the administration argues that the United States was founded as a white nation whose citizens are defined by their European heritage and the land they inhabited, an echo of the “blood and soil” ideology of Germany in the 1930s.

Making that shift requires erasing not just our multicultural past but also our history. On July 4 the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report titled Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The report says that the National Museum of American History (NMAH) “fails in the basic task of illuminating our heritage.” '

It continued: “Our central finding is not that the Museum has simply added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors, or broadened its historical scope. Rather, it is that Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

Even more oddly, the report was a direct and personal attack on Dr. Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, whom it accused of exercising “an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

The report claims that NMAH “purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.” It claims that the Founders are minimized or excluded and that the story told of the nation is “one of regret, tragedy, and shame.”

It claims the museum has a “longtime staff reading group devoted to” a framework that treats museums as places of activism and that NMAH engages in “illegal alien activism” and “transgender activism.” It attributes to the museum guilt by association for organizations that have helped to fund exhibits, including the Mellon Foundation, which, an endnote explains, “allocated $72 million to ‘racial justice’ projects.” Indeed, the authors of the report appeared to be most exercised over racism, shown in their anger over the museum’s presentation of human enslavement.

They said the NMAH should “tell the story of how the colonies inherited slavery from both global and European slaving practices” and how “America’s Founders helped spark a worldwide movement that ultimately ended slavery.” They want the museum to emphasize how 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War—they did not appear to want mentioned that 258,000 of them died to protect enslavement—and how “Americans came to reject Jim Crow and segregation.” It should tell how “the United States…has done more to advance and secure fundamental rights than any other nation in the world.”

Part of that, the report says, should include “America’s contributions to global freedom, from saving Europe from multiple tyrannies, to illustrating the virtues of a market economy and a free people.”

The White House report is a nakedly political document, seeking to prove that “the museum profession has catechized and codified the ideological dogma of DEI to…an astonishing degree.” It builds on Trump’s belief that the Smithsonian has an “improper ideology” that Trump says is too focused on “how bad slavery was.”

That political purpose was clear on July 21, when Hartig and Yale University U.S. historian David Blight appeared before the House Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Testifying as well were two critics of the Smithsonian: Mike Gonzalez of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Matthew Spalding, from Michigan’s Christian Hillsdale College. Another hearing the next day before the House Administration Committee continued the same themes.

Hartig told the committee that the report was inaccurate, saying “we unwaveringly attest that it does not accurately or fairly characterize the full range of work at the museum.” In fact, the report ignores large, long-term gallery exhibitions on subjects like the history of the U.S. military currently on display—that exhibit includes George Washington’s sword and the chairs Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee used at the Appomattox surrender—in favor of past, temporary, revolving wall exhibitions in display cases along a wall. The exhibit that infuriated the Republicans by mentioning transgender youth, called “Girlhood (It’s Complicated),” closed more than three years ago.

In her testimony, Hartig responded to the report’s accusation that the museum “fails to substantively present America’s Founders and Founding.” As Kelsey Ables of The Atlantic reported, Hartig pointed out: “We have a dozen exhibitions that include the founding era right now: 368 objects, 340 labels. George Washington is mentioned 54 times. You have to walk by a whole section on George Washington in the Kenneth Behring Hall of Military History to get to a 15-foot-tall reproduction of the Declaration of Independence.”

But, in fact, the goal of the report was demonstrably to create a straw man for MAGA supporters to hate. Ben Davis of artnet reported that Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) claimed Hartig strives “to represent queer pedophiles, indoctrination, and grooming of kids at an American history museum,” and demanded: “Do you know how many kids get raped by adults every year in this country?” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) repeatedly demanded of Hartig where the exhibitions honoring “50 million aborted babies” are. Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO) demanded: “Do you love America?”

“I love this country unconditionally,” Hartig replied. She would repeat that sentiment repeatedly over the course of the two days of hearings as representatives talked over her to get clips to put on social media.

In a response to the administration’s report, Representative Joe Morelle of New York, the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, pointed out that in February 2017, a month after his first inauguration, Trump praised the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and its founding director, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, for sharing “the great struggle for freedom and equality that prevailed against the sins of slavery and the injustice of discrimination.”

“Smithsonian museums did not change what they teach about slavery between 2017 and today,” Morelle writes; instead, “the President changed his position on whether they should be allowed to teach it.”

Morelle pointed out that the White House report demonized Hartig by taking her words out of context. For example, it made much of her statement, “Loving America is very complicated,” while omitting that she said that in a discussion with descendants of enslaved Americans.

It attacked her use of the common historical term “problematize,” which means to show that a simple idea is more complex than people realize, criticizing her statement that “the profession has ‘to figure out’ how ‘we’re going to’ ‘problematize’ the ‘250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.’”

Morelle points out that the disjointed fragments of this sentence show how deliberately the authors of the report butchered it. The full sentence was: “We have to figure out, all together, how we’re going to commemorate, problematize, remember, [and] celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.” The report cut those words and then criticized her for insufficient celebration of the U.S.

The president doesn’t control the Smithsonian, so the only thing the report’s authors could recommend was “a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.’” On July 24 the president issued Executive Order 14415, titled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution.” It ordered the National Park Service to place temporary signage outside the Smithsonian “that corrects inaccurate information presented inside the Museum.”

As Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post noted, the attacks will take a toll on “the scholars, curators, volunteers, security guards and the rest of the loyal staff [who] will have to pass signs that demean the integrity of their work.” And it’s likely the MAGA ecosystem will pick up the harassment. Earlier this month, Bridget Gillespie, a former intern at Jefferson’s home, Monticello, detailed in The American Prospect how that harassment—accusations of “wokeness,” reviews calling tour guides “morons,” visitors in pairs with one asking something provocative about slavery or states’ rights while the other filmed—changed the way interpreters operated.

History is not just a set of facts and events. It is the study of how and why societies change. Why do people act in certain ways? Are there patterns in human behavior? What makes a society successful? What makes one fail?

Accuracy is imperative. Without it, we will learn the wrong answers—not just about the details the judges of the Presidential 1776 Award competition seem to have changed to privilege white Americans over an Indian immigrant, but also over whether our country’s foundation is about race and land or, as the Founders said, about principles and the rule of law.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

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A page published by the White House entitled "President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian" lists exhibits, educational sites and more tha

The list of objectionable content comes a week after White House officials sent a letter asking eight of the Smithsonian's museums to submit their current and future plans for exhibitions, social media content and other material. The institution's director Lonnie Bunch was told it had 120 days to comply for what the administration says will be a "comprehensive review," in order to bring the Smithsonian in line with Trump's cultural directives ahead of the country's 250th anniversary celebrations.

The administration has directed the museums to replace "divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions."

NPR reached out to the White House asking for comment about the article highlighting the Smithsonian artists. They have not responded.

The list of artists and content seems to be drawn from art that was highlighted in a recent article in The Federalist. The conservative online magazine argued that the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, for example, was filled with "wall-to-wall, anti-American propaganda."

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