Most people know President Trump tends to overreact to situations he doesn’t like. But the exhibits and programming at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History are even worse than he described—and the scholars behind them more radical than you realized.
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First, there’s a reason why the Smithsonian is again in the news. On September 8, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III announced that he will retire at the end of the year. He has been described with such acclaim that it is difficult to accept that Trump’s criticisms of his leadership might be justified:
Bunch, 73, has earned a reputation as a historian unafraid of confronting some of the darkest periods in U.S. history and an adept political operator who maintained strong bipartisan support during his tenure. Bunch served the Smithsonian Institution for 38 years and oversaw some of the Smithsonian’s most ambitious projects, including the construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which he founded.
Further gilding Bunch’s lily, the Organization of American Historians announced that it was appalled by President Trump’s criticisms:
The Organization of American Historians, the nation’s largest group of scholars of U.S. history, issued a scathing statement condemning the report as ‘part of an ongoing and multipronged assault by the Trump administration against accurate and evidence-based history in American public life.’
The historians also disagreed with the report’s assessment about the state of the Smithsonian vis-à-vis American history and culture, with Anthea Hartig, the director of the National Museum of American History, taking the lead:
The Organization of American Historians dismissed the July report as part of an attempt to return to a superficial vision of America that never existed, noting that the museum complex houses foundational artifacts like the Star-Spangled Banner, Abraham Lincoln’s top hat, and exhibits celebrating American industrial might. Anthea Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, defended the institution during a July congressional hearing, testifying before a House subcommittee that the museum does not take sides in political debates and operates under strict standards of scholarship and nonpartisanship.
Their objections are specious.
To determine whether you, the reader, think I’m overreacting to the statements of the Smithsonian’s defenders, I thought it might be helpful to include some of , as documented in the White House report. That is, you can see how they refer to American history, and you can judge their objectivity regarding the administration’s concerns:
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As Director Hartig explained in a June 2024 presentation, all her attention was focused on flying the Smithsonian Pride Alliance’s ‘intersexual pride flag during June’ in 2023 and 2024: ‘One of the other key policy changes that’s just happened this month internally has been—I’m the liaison to the Pride Alliance here—and for the first time in the history of the Smithsonian, we flew the pride flag last year and this year, and so that’s a small thing in a way: to fly their intersexual pride flag during June.’
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In fact, NMAH’s Calendar of Exhibitions and Events for the summer of 2025 reveals that America’s national history museum did not devote any special programming to celebrate Independence Day on July 4th, 2025, despite the museum being open that day. Even the article NMAH published describing the NMAH-related programming that would be taking place during July 2025 failed to even refer to ‘Independence Day’ or ‘July 4.’ No one reading that article would even know the holiday exists, let alone that the following year—2026—is the 250th anniversary of the drafting and adoption of the Declaration of Independence for which we celebrate it.
[snip]
NMAH leadership has openly stated that it seeks to focus on America’s flaws this year. In 2020, Director Hartig asserted that the museum profession has ‘to figure out’ how ‘we’re going to problematize’ the ‘250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.’ In 2023, Hartig wrote that ‘given that we are lurching towards the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, let’s focus on the gaps surrounding that document.’
These are only a fraction of the statements that were documented in the White House report. I think that anyone who is looking for a balance in the exhibits in the museum would agree that promoting Pride Day was a leftist effort; excluding Independence Day was an insult to our Founders who risked their lives against Great Britain; and intentionally focusing on America’s flaws to denigrate our country is a political betrayal of our country.
These efforts by Bunch and his cohorts are an attack on our country. They are intended to rewrite history through a hateful, Marxist lens, so that our Founders are strongly implied to be “white supremacists” (a phrase that the museum uses to denigrate America’s founding ideals) with few redeeming qualities.
I suspect President Trump will ensure the next leaders of the Smithsonian and its museums try to provide some objectivity, even as they celebrate our country, the most successful democratic republic in the world.
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Image created using AI.