New Delhi: As it approaches its 250th anniversary, America’s Smithsonian Institution is facing a crisis as US President Donald Trump turns his gaze from colleges to museums.
On 12 August, Trump sent shockwaves through the American museum ecosystem. In a letter to Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch III, he issued what many see as an untenable directive—slapping the institute with a 120-day deadline to “replace divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions.”
The directive is an extension of his March 2025 executive order titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’, which criticised narratives that instilled “a sense of national shame”. With 21 museums and 14 education and research centres, the Smithsonian is the nerve-centre of American culture and knowledge-production, its memory and repository.
Critics have pointed out that the attack on the Smithsonian—which is federally funded though it was established as an independent entity—is part of a broader agenda against so-called ‘woke’ individuals and institutions. This is something Trump himself reinforced in a Truth Social post last week.
“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…,” he wrote. “I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities… WOKE IS BROKE.”
News reports say that, through this “Orwellian” move, Trump aims to remake American culture in his image, resting on US exceptionalism. The American Association for State and Local History called it “censorship” to fit a “triumphalist narrative” that’s the “antithesis of historical practice.’
Eight of the Smithsonian’s 21 museums are currently under review. Following the 12 August letter, the White House released an article titled ‘President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian’, complete with a list of “objectionable content”. This includes work at the National Portrait Gallery depicting immigration, an entire exhibit on LGBTQ+ history at the American History Museum, and material that is simply anti-slavery or confronts American racism.
At the helm of this makeover is lawyer Lindsey Halligan, once a Miss Colorado contender.
“There’s a lot about other countries’ history that has nothing to do with America, and I think, you know, America is so special,” she told The Washington Post, in a detailed profile of her rise. “We should all be focused on how amazing our country is and how much America has to offer.”
Despite leading a Herculean project that could radically alter one of the world’s weightiest cultural institutions, Halligan has never worked in a museum or studied museology. Instead, as Jim Trusty, a former member of Trump’s legal team, told The Post, she is an “avid reader of history”.
“I had no idea that there was going to be an Executive Order regarding the Smithsonian, but in hindsight it makes a lot of sense to me that Lindsey would have a role,” he went on to tell the newspaper.
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Whitewashing US history?
This frantic act of mass, reverse ‘cancelling’ has put not just the Smithsonian, but the entire American art and history fraternity on edge.
I’ve never seen a list like this,” art historian and Stanford University professor Richard Meyer told NPR. “I mean, it does remind me a bit of McCarthyism.”
McCarthyism sought to purge institutions and the government itself, supposedly to cleanse American identity of its ‘Communist’ and ‘Left-wing’ tendencies.
Meyer added that this current bout of cultural warfare is “less clear-cut” than the battles of the 1980s and 1990s, with inflexion points such as artist Robert Mapplethorpe coming under attack for his “homoerotic photographs”.
“It’s becoming very difficult to know exactly what is happening, who is making these decisions, how the art is being treated and at what point is it censorship?” said Meyer.
Among the content now in flux is a campaign by the National Museum of African American History and Culture that examines the ethos of American society through the lens of white privilege. It featured Howard University professor Ibram X Kendi, whom the White House has described as “a hardcore woke activist”.
“It’s a way to discredit me and distract from my scholarship and to continuously try to make me into this boogey-person who should not be taken seriously. Because, frankly, I could see this White House not wanting their supporters to take my work seriously, because I think if they did, they wouldn’t take the White House seriously,” said Kendi, the author of How to be An Antiracist, in response to the White House article.
For him, Trump’s onslaught evokes the Jim Crow era—when leaders were “firmly against our public museums presenting an accurate picture of slavery, or the Civil War, of civil rights activism.”
In a piece for The Atlantic, writer Clint Smith, calls this reshaping a “thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.” He noted that Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian’s first Black secretary, has been “fighting off” MAGA efforts to capture American popular imagination but that the “presidential pressure” could make such efforts more and more difficult.
“The MAGA movement wants to tell a story about America that is disproportionately focused on what its proponents perceive to be the exceptionalism of this country. They are invested in this story because having to look too closely at the disturbing parts of American history would mean having to look closely at the disturbing parts of themselves,” Smith writes. “But instead of ignoring the shameful parts of our past, shouldn’t we—as individuals and as a country—want to learn from aspects of our history that we are not proud of?”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)