Trump Demands the Smithsonian Deliver Shiny, Happy History
His fascistic insistence that it eliminate “divisive or partisan narratives” reveals what he doesn’t understand about history and about America.
DONALD TRUMP’S LATEST MOVE against the Smithsonian Institution is the most noxious yet. It is part of his larger effort—alongside his attacks on universities and the scientific enterprise, his clashes with law firms and news organizations, and his takeover of the Kennedy Center—to remake reality as he sees fit, including American history and American culture.
As a historian, I was appalled by his March executive order about the Smithsonian called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” (which I wrote about for The Bulwark here). As a citizen, I was disturbed by his illegal attempt in May to fire the director of the National Portrait Gallery, a maneuver that the Smithsonian rejected (but that ultimately led the director to resign anyway). And now this week brings from the White House a “Letter to the Smithsonian: Internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials,” issued by Trump’s unqualified Smithsonian “czar,” his budget director, and his policy director.
Here’s the letter’s opening gambit:
As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Nation’s founding, it is more important than ever that our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story. In this spirit . . . we will be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions. This initiative aims 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.
The letter goes on to demand that, within 120 days:
Museums should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials.
And how are Smithsonian personnel to know what might be considered “divisive” or “ideologically driven language”? Well, the Trump administration wants to work together! With the Smithsonian! Because, they say,
We view this process as a collaborative and forward-looking opportunity—one that empowers museum staff to embrace a revitalized curatorial vision rooted in the strength, breadth, and achievements of the American story. By focusing on Americanism—the people, principles, and progress that define our nation—we can work together to renew the Smithsonian’s role as the world’s leading museum institution. [Bolded word in original.]
They sure do want “collaboration”—like Anton Mussert, or Philippe Pétain, or Vidkun Quisling. Because this is fascism, and the rewriting of history in service of a fascist mythology is part of the program, from censoring the Smithsonian and the National Park Service to gutting PBS and floating the idea of PragerU replacing it. From putting Jim Crow-era Confederate statues back up to pushing for the return of racist mascots and Confederate names to DHS’s use of manifest destiny and American fascist texts in its social media account.
IF YOU STUDY TO BECOME A HISTORIAN in the United States, learning the discipline as an undergraduate and in graduate school and then pursuing it as your vocation, you find that history is a process of argumentation and analysis. We use primary sources to make compelling theses about the past and how it shapes what comes next. 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.
So in response to the white-supremacist bullshit the Trump administration is going to attempt to spray like a firehose across our cultural institutions, let me offer this counternarrative.
Saying slavery was an atrocity and slave owners monstrously ran concentration camps from their pretty villas is only divisive if you’re a racist.
Saying the Confederacy was a seditious betrayal of the United States in the service of human bondage and trafficking, and that its leaders were traitors to their oaths who should be condemned at every turn, is only divisive if you’re a racist.
Saying the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II was a disgrace and the kind of violation of the Constitution and moral decency that must be condemned is only divisive if you’re a racist.
Saying the vigilante, mob, and governmental violence against Latino Americans across all of U.S. history including the present is an abomination is only divisive if you’re a racist.
Saying Jim Crow-era neo-Confederate monuments and memorials are statues for racism and domestic terrorism against African Americans that should be pulled down from their plinths is only divisive if you’re a racist.
Saying that the violence against Native Americans, from 1492 to the present, should be studied as a systemic, ongoing attempt at genocide is only divisive if you’re a racist.
There are beautiful, inspiring stories in the American past. But there are also these many horrors, dark shadows right alongside the bright. A historian’s duty is to see them all, not to cover our eyes and ears and tell only uplifting stories. And as a historian, I am not taking critique from the people still putting up “Fuck Your Feelings” bumper stickers and t-shirts, from the people who still want to argue “Heritage, Not Hate” while flying a Confederate battle flag repopularized for opposition to the Civil Rights Act, from the people producing propaganda cartoons to spoon white-supremacist ideas into U.S. classrooms.
Being a historian isn’t lucrative. It doesn’t give you power or wealth or status. You don’t do it because you are trying to rewrite the past for an agenda. You do it because it matters. Because as unpleasant as it is to acknowledge the level of horror, of violence, of shameful abuse of our fellow human beings that exists in our country’s history, it is only through learning about it that we can strive for a more perfect union. That we can live up to the ideals of our founding documents, the ideals of equality and freedom, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We do not cherish or honor these ideals by lying about who we have been, but by candidly remembering who we really were—and by always striving to be better.
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