INa Brightly Lit Gallery, they see the 66 million-year-old skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. In a darkened room, they studied the flags that inspired them to write the national anthem on Francis Scott’s Key. On the vast aviation hangers, they look at the space shuttle. And on a modest corner, they submitted majesticly past Emmett Till’s cas. This is a 14-year-old black boy who is allegedly whispering a white woman in the Southern United States.
Over the past 178 years, visitors have become millions of visitors to the Smithsonian Facility, the world’s largest museum, education and research complex in Washington. On Thursday, Donald Trump arrived with his cultural destruction ball.
The US president, who has attempted to eradicate “attraction” since returning to power in January, accused the Smithsonian of trying to rewrite history on issues of race and gender. With an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” he directed the removal of “inappropriate, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the renowned museum.
The move came across disappointment from historians who saw it as an attempt to whitewash the past and suppress systemic racism and social justice debates. Trump also took over the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, so in an authoritarian way, he fears that he aims to control the future by controlling the past.
“This is a five-alarm fire for American public history, science and education,” said Samuel Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst University. “The Smithsonians have faced moments of crisis in the past, but have not been attacked like this directly by government agencies in their long history. It’s both troublesome and very scary.”
The Smithsonian was pregnant in the 19th century by British scientist James Smithson. James Smithson has never set foot in the United States, but has bequeathed his property for the purposes of the Washington-based facility, which supports the “increasing and dissemination of knowledge.” In 1846, 17 years after Smithson’s death, President James Polk signed a law calling for the formation of an institution.
The Smithsonian currently spans 21 museums, most of which extend to the country’s capitals lined with national malls, from the US Capitol to the Washington Monument. The National Portrait Gallery, which displays Trump photos in the President’s Gallery, is located in downtown Washington.
The Smithsonian also covers the National Zoo, famous for its giant pandas, and 14 educational and research centres that employ thousands of scientists and academics and offer a variety of programs to the school.
Visitors to Fosilab at the National Museum of Natural History can see old osteopaths shaving rocks to discover bones buried for hundreds of millions of years. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory played a key role in the Horizon Telescope Project, which produced the first image of a black hole in 2019.
Around 60% of the Smithsonian funds come from the federal government, but trust funds and private sources also provide the money.
The agency knows the share of the controversy. In 1995, the Air and Space Museum planned to display Enola Gay, the B-29 superforeseen that dropped the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima. The exhibition was cancelled and the plane was displayed without interpretation.
Trump visited the Museum of African American History and Culture a month after taking office in 2017. According to Ronnie Bunch, the museum’s founding director, his response to the Dutch role in the world’s slave trade was “You know, they love me.”
Although Trump paid little attention to the facility during the remainder of his first term, in 2019, his vice-president Mike Pence took part in the announcement of Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit at the Air and Space Museum, marking the 50th anniversary of the release of the Apollo 11.
But like many other ways, Trump’s second season is a completely different beast. According to the White House executive order, the president said, “We believe there has been a coordinated and extensive effort to rewrite our country’s history and replace objective facts with distorted narratives driven by ideology rather than truth.
He argues that the “revisionist movement aims to undermine the remarkable US outcomes by casting its founding principles and historical milestones from a negative standpoint.” The order also claims that it was “widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement. The Smithsonian Association has been under the influence of divisive, racially ideology in recent years.”
The African American Museum confirms the example by claiming that “difficulty”, “individualism”, and “nuclear family” have declared aspects of “white culture.” This refers to content that was on the museum’s website in 2020 and was later removed after criticism.
This order points to the exhibition. It is a tale of race and American sculpture currently on display at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, where societies, including the United States, use race to establish a system of power and state that “racial is human invention.”
It criticizes the Women’s Museum, which was planned to “celebrate the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports,” and aims to “not recognize women as women in all respects.”
The order provides that Vice President JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian Regent Committee, will work with Congress to work with the Bureau of Management and Budget to block programs that “segregate American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies that are inconsistent with federal law and policy.” It calls for new citizen members to “commit to advance the policies of this order.”
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All of this is consistent with his administration’s efforts to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in government, universities and businesses. The Smithsonian closed its diversity office shortly after the president signed an executive order in January banning the DEI program in organizations that receive federal money.
It is also a work that brings Trump’s long-standing demands for “patriotic” education. In February he issued an executive order reestablishing the 1776 committee. This was a rift in the New York Times 1619 project. He has strongly criticized the renaming or deletion of Confederate statues and monuments.
This order features the conservative Heritage Foundation, which created the influential project 2025. The ThinkTank website describes the 1619 project as “another attempt to believe that your country is racist and evil, and that revolutionary transformation is necessary.” Another warns that the Smithsonian proposed Latino museum will become a “awakening edification factory.”
But progressive says that cultural clampdowns only create more discord. “We can’t “foster unity” by refusing to tell the truth about our history,” said Tope Folarin, an American writer in Nigeria and executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. True ignorance really deepens social division.
“These museums are important because they tell the perfect story of America in a dirt-paved way. We only achieve unity when we consider the truth about how this country was founded and acknowledge the heroes who brought us in and worked continuously.”
On Friday, the Smithsonian, who has long enjoyed positive relationships with both Democrats and Republican administrations, was filled with uncertainty. Many were gazing at this moment, but it remained unclear how the orders would affect staffing levels or current and future exhibits, including plans to celebrate the 250th anniversary of US independence next year.
David Bright, a historian and close friend of Bunch, the Smithsonian secretary, said, “I haven’t spoken to him yet. I’m sure he’s trying to decide what to do. I hope he won’t step down, but that’s probably what they want.
Blight, the current president of the American historian organization, read the executive order, “I was appalled, angry, frustrated, but not completely surprised.” “There were many other executive orders, but this is a head-on attack,” he said. “I read it essentially as a declaration of war on American historians and curators and the Smithsonian.”
A history and African American research professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut continues:
“I see it as insults, frustration, and an attempt to control what we do as historians. On the other hand, executive orders of this kind are so ridiculous that many people in my field laugh at it.
Trump’s previous cultural targets include the Kennedy Center and the Institute of Museums and Library Services. This week he urged Congressional Republicans to repay National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Services (PBS). He also threatened to cut funds for the university that refused to bend his knees.
Devastation sees the movements drawn from the authoritarian playbook as follows: “That’s what the Nazis did. What Spain did. That’s what Mussolini tried. This is like the Soviets.
The sentiment was reflected by Raymond Arceneau, professor of southern history at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. He said:
He added: “It’s so calm. Everything I’ve worked on in my career is simply removed by this one executive order. It’s like a bag of Roman bastards at the level of ignorance, malice and anti-intellectualism.”
Arceneau, a biographer of John Lewis, who was instrumental in creating the African American Museum, said the late lawmaker was “shocked” by Trump’s order.
