Donald Trump’s first salvo against the Smithsonian Institution came in March, when the president signed an odd executive order directing officials to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American” ideology from its museums. A few months later, he fired the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, despite questions about whether he had the legal authority to do so.
Last week, the White House let the Smithsonian know that it has plans to conduct a far-reaching review of its museums to ensure the content it presents to the public aligns with Trump’s views on American history. It’s against this backdrop that NBC News reported:
Trump voiced outrage this afternoon in a post on Truth Social about the types of exhibits shown in the Smithsonian and other museums across the country. ‘The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,’ he said.
I wrote a book last year about Republican efforts to rewrite recent history, and Trump’s tirade suggests the broader campaign is poised to become even more aggressive.
The Republican’s online rant went on to say that he’s “instructed” attorneys “to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities.”
Trump concluded, “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
The harangue comes just days after Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, falsely claimed that Smithsonian exhibits have “clearly been taken over by leftwing activists” who have “obscenely defaced this beloved institution.”
To the extent that reality has any bearing on the public conversation, any visit to any of the Smithsonian museums should make clear that it includes a great many exhibits celebrating American triumphs. Trump’s insistence otherwise suggests he hasn’t stepped foot in any of the museums anytime recently.
What’s more, the idea that exhibits talks about “how bad Slavery was” necessarily leads to questions about which parts of slavery the president believes weren’t “bad.”
As for the larger context, The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg had a striking column late last week on what happened when a far-right political party in Poland gained power and quickly targeted the Museum of the Second World War, then being built in Gdansk.
“The museum was supposed to explore the war’s global context and to emphasize the toll it took on civilians,” Goldberg explained. “Among its collection were keys to the homes of Jews murdered in Jedwabne. Before it ever opened, [Poland’s illiberal Law and Justice party] wanted to shut it down for being insufficiently patriotic.”
If this sounds familiar, that’s not your imagination. Pawel Machcewicz, the founding director of the Museum of the Second World War, told Goldberg it’s been unsettling to see American museums subjected to the sort of political intimidation he experienced in Poland. “I believed that American democracy had somehow stronger rules,” he said. “It’s older than Polish democracy. I thought the autonomy of research, the autonomy of museums, would be something sacred in the U.S. It turns out that it can also be subverted. So this is a very pessimistic lesson for us.” Over the course of seven months, Trump has taken steps to exert unusual influence and control over everything from the economy to higher education, the judiciary to the media, private businesses to nonprofit organizations, the military to cultural institutions, labor unions to law enforcement, health care to sports teams, independent federal agencies to banks, the legal profession to the entertainment industry. The president is now making it painfully clear that he has museums in his sights, too. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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