“To ensure alignment with the President’s directive”

On 12 August, White House officials sent a letter to the Smithsonian Institution stating that it “will be leading a comprehensive internal review…to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”

This political incursion into the operation of an independent establishment was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, which stated:

The White House plans to conduct a far-reaching review of Smithsonian museum exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of America’s 250th anniversary to ensure the museums align with President Trump’s interpretation of American history.

The Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin responded:

First, let’s stop referring to Trump’s “interpretation of American history.” He doesn’t have an interpretation of anything remotely related to history. What Trump has is an authoritarian agenda that demands control over how Americans remember history as a means to justify its current political and ideological agenda and claim to power.

This most recent act of censorship is right out of the authoritarian playbook and one we have already witnessed in reference to the National Park Service.

At the Bulwark, Grand View University professor Thomas Lecaque took particular issue with the letter’s demand that “our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story”:

We uncover new sources; we apply new methodologies; we have new lenses to look at sources and new contexts. Languages, databases, technologies, viewpoints—we don’t rewrite history as we learn but rather ask new questions about the texts we already knew. Historians of every generation have new issues that they are interested in, that they read the texts and find are important. When today’s historians write about the historical effects of climate change or about the ways pandemics shape societies or about the lives of trans people in centuries past, we’re not “inventing” these things, we’re just paying new attention to things that have been there all along, and seeing them with fresh eyes.

I’ll tell you what the Trump administration is inventing, though. That line about “Americanism” in the Trump letter, focusing on the country’s “strength, breadth, and achievements”? That invitation to imagine a flawless nation making an unbroken string of progress is really just a bedtime story for children. White children. It’s not history; it’s not reality; it’s propaganda to allow Trump and his followers to sleep at night before they get up for another day of brutalizing people of color.

My perspective is that Donald Trump cares about what gratifies his ego. Sometimes that touches on history, such as when he promotes a false story about his golf course property being important in the Civil War or when he insists he’s outdone all previous Presidents on some measure. But studying history depends on respecting facts, and Trump has never done that—not in history, not in business, not in politics, not in his personal life.

The Smithsonian Institution is popular and widely respected. So is the National Park Service. So are our schools, universities, and libraries. All are under attack. We the people need to protect our historical and scholarly institutions from trumpery, and from the ideologues and sycophants who are pushing it.