One of the most shameful acts of the second Trump Administration is its effort to undo the honest reckoning America’s national cultural institutions have finally begun — a reactionary political purge aimed at independent museum curation. A case in point is the new White House report on the long-overdue historical turn taken by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
The institutional press is attacking the report, rightly, as an attempt to censor independent museum curation — and that is exactly how we read it. The 162-page “Saving America’s Story,” produced by the White House Domestic Policy Council, lays out in damning detail how the museum offers an honest view of American history that “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated.” That is, the museum no longer repeats the celebratory fairy tale.
Instead, the museum offers the message, captured in one exhibit, that when they founded the U.S., “early leaders envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom—but only for some.” This is correct. Freedom for some was the founders’ design. The museum is doing its job.
The report is exactly a cheerleading document seeking to hide America’s warts. What it seeks is a sanitized 1776-style history of the United States that papers over the country’s actual sins in the manner of the comfortable — a narrative that resembles the 1619 Project only in being told from a particular angle, but this is the angle of the comfortable.
The report’s examples show the degree to which the right-wing donor class is trying to recapture the history museum. In one exhibit, the Pledge of Allegiance is accurately described as a tool to “instill American nationalism through flag ceremonies.” Nationalism? There is no pejorative edge; there is the word. Nationalism is the ideology of national supremacy; patriotism is love of country including its actual sins. The museum used the right word.
The museum also highlights accurate facts about the Founders. Benjamin Franklin is called a racist and anti-immigrant. Alexander Hamilton owned slaves. The report whines that curators are “downplaying or completely excluding facts about their abolitionist efforts” — meaning, the report wants abolitionist footnotes to outweigh the central fact that these men held human beings as property. They did.
One Smithsonian “didactic” about the Broadway musical “Hamilton” described Hamilton as “influential and flawed.” He was both. He did draft the Federalist Papers, and he did help Washington win the war, and he also enslaved people and helped found the New York Manumission Society in 1785. The museum’s two-word summary captured the truth more honestly than the report’s thousand-word rebuttal.
Speaking at Brown University in 2016, the report notes, Smithsonian Under Secretary for Museums and Culture Kevin Gover said he favors replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, because Christopher Columbus was a “slaver” and “killer” — which are established historical facts, not partisan provocations. A historian noting what Columbus did.
Smithsonian Under Secretary for Education Monique Chism and museum director Anthea Hartig began museum speeches with “land acknowledgements” that note the obvious: the continent’s Indigenous nations were here first, the land was taken, and the taking is the foundation of the country’s wealth. This is what happened.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum and Smithsonian Learning Lab created a poster that says, “Whiteness as a concept is foundational to the history of the United States, actively shaping this country’s social, cultural, political and economic structures.” It is true. Whiteness — the legal and social construction of racial hierarchy — did found the country. Slavery did. Land theft from Native peoples did. Redlining did. The poster named what is.
Naturally, the museum does not exclude transgender people from history. In its “We Belong Here” exhibit, visitors are told that “The struggle for equal opportunity in sports began long before Title IX became law in 1972. And it continues today as transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender female athletes demand equality.” This is accurate — Title IX’s promise of equal opportunity includes trans athletes, and pretending otherwise is the donor-class politics imposed on the past.
In December 2024, the report notes, museum director Hartig said a “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” exhibit was meant to present “growing up female in the United States since the early republic in the face of patriarchal oppression.” Patriarchal oppression is what women faced in this country, and a museum that says so is doing the work a museum is supposed to do. The report’s complaint is the complaint of people who do not want the country described as it was.
The report’s critics, largely on the political left, object that it is imposing its own bias. They are right. The museum is deeply connected to the federal government and claims to be a national museum that tells the American story — and that means telling it honestly, not turning it into the plaything of today’s dominant donor-class mythology. The feds fund 62% of the Smithsonian budget, or some $1.1 billion in fiscal 2026. The Smithsonian Board of Regents includes six members of Congress, the Vice President, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and nine citizens. That is precisely why the museum must be defended against political direction, not handed over to it.
The Trump Administration’s suggestion that the museum offer a less honest approach to American history is an attempt to whitewash the country’s complexity and its difficult chapters — and the report makes this explicit, despite its denials.
The report says the Smithsonian should “tell the whole story of a nation, including the good and the bad, so Museum visitors can understand the development that led our nation to where it is today.” That is what the museum was already doing. What the report actually wants is to define “the bad” down to a footnote and “the good” up to the headline, and call that “the whole story.”
That is a whitewash of America’s complicated history. The museum was right to resist it.
