Donald Trump certainly hasn’t made it easy on the Smithsonian Institution this year. In late March, for example, 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.
More recently, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History decided to alter an exhibit that referenced Trump’s impeachments. It ultimately restored information about the incumbent president to its display, but it made changes to the original and removed some details.
This 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.
At an unrelated Oval Office event on Thursday, the president commented on his vision for the first time.
“Well, we want the museums to treat our country fairly,” the Republican said. “We want the museums to talk about the history of our country in a fair manner, not in a ‘woke’ manner or in a racist manner, which is what many of them, not all of them, but many of them are doing. Our museums have an obligation to represent what happened in our country over the years, good and bad, but what happened over the years in an accurate way.”
Obviously, few would take issue with the idea of museums being “fair” and “accurate,” but the devil’s in the details: We’re not talking about objective fact-checking conducted by experienced historians and other scholars; we’re talking about Trump appointees looking for “woke” Smithsonian exhibitions — based on standards that don’t appear to exist.
Indeed, this week’s letter to the Smithsonian was signed by three people, including White House senior associate Lindsey Halligan, a 35-year-old lawyer with no professional or academic background in history or museum studies.
“We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad,” she told The Washington Post in April. That overemphasis, she added, “just makes us grow further and further apart.”
There have been reports this week on a growing number of Smithsonian employees who are “scared” of the White House’s offensive. Given the circumstances, it’s tough to blame them.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
