How the Smithsonian lost its way Trump’s reforms are essential

The mission statement of the Smithsonian Institution dedicates it to “shaping the future by preserving heritage.” This is the right aspiration for a national museum: to curate past knowledge and transmit it to future generations. Such institutions play a nation-building role. They are indispensable.

Yet recent years have shown the commitment to be only on paper. And as the institution’s conflict with the Trump administration deepens this year, it appears that it likely can’t fulfill its important national function if current leadership is allowed to stay in charge.

“There is no definition of a national museum,” per the Library of Congress, but it is generally accepted that they act as repositories of a nation’s collective inheritance. The National Gallery of Art, for example, when it was conceived by the financier and philanthropist Andrew Mellon in 1937, announced a mission “to serve the United States of America in a national role by preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the understanding of works of art.” 

The National Palace Museum in Taiwan provides another example. It displays a permanent collection of some 700,000 imperial artefacts and artworks, most of them collected by Chinese emperors of different dynasties throughout the millennia. The fleeing nationalist movement, which settled in Taiwan after losing the civil war on mainland China in 1949, saved these treasures from Mao’s communists for Chinese posterity.

In post-colonial Africa, national museums, according to a 2013 scholarly paper, “became symbols of national unity, where the diversity and dynamism of new independent nations could be displayed and celebrated.” Likewise, the National Museum of the Prado in Madrid, replete with Velazquezes and Goyas, instructs Spaniards and foreign visitors on Spain’s rich inheritance. The Louvre fulfills the equivalent function in France.

The Smithsonian Institution no longer does so in America. It may get almost two-thirds of its funding from the US taxpayer, but it has joined forces with those engaged in the national tear-down. And the Trump administration’s war against the institution — which flared up again in late December, and now is headed to a showdown early in the new year — is a clash between defenders of American continuity, on one hand, and those who seek to change foundational aspects of national life and transmit a sense of shame, on the other. 

Recent outrages at the Smithsonian include deliberate use of the institution to “legitimize” the 1619 Project, wall texts that push ideologies on “settler colonialism” and “systemic racism,” and the collection of trash and paraphernalia from the BLM riots as art. 

It’s in the face of such curatorial policies that the Trump administration has decided that the Smithsonian urgently needs an about-face, especially considering the 250th anniversary of America’s founding in July, and has argued that American continuity depends on this reversal. It has warned it in its National Security Strategy that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure,” and is acting to prevent such erasure at home, too.

Though drawing less attention than tariffs, ICE operations, and the takeover of Venezuela, the Trump administration’s approach to the Smithsonian has been one of its flagship policies. As early as last March, Trump demanded in an executive order that the Smithsonian stop “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” In August the administration sent a letter to museum leadership demanding documentation on content from current and future exhibitions, 250th-anniversary planning, educational materials, and indexing of permanent collections from its top-eight museums. But the Smithsonian has been stalling for time, and when it has sent materials, they have fallen far short of what was requested. 

On Dec. 19, the White House posted a letter it had sent the day before to the head of the Smithsonian, Secretary Lonnie Bunch III, informing him that it was running out of patience, and giving him a deadline of Jan. 13, 2026, to comply with the order. The letter’s authors, Domestic Policy Director Vince Haley and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, said they wrote “with particular urgency and concern that the museums of the Smithsonian Institution be well positioned” for the national celebrations. 

The institution’s positioning to date can easily be gleaned from an opinion column that ran in August in The New York Times. Former Times editorial board member David Firestone, wrote, approvingly, of a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, that “it’s impossible to leave its magnificent building on the National Mall without feeling shamed and haunted.” Much of the museum’s collection, he added, “is a rebuke to the notion of American exceptionalism, explaining that the United States became a global economic power by enslaving Africans.” Other Smithsonian museums performed the same function, he said. “The Portrait Gallery now has labels on many of its paintings of prominent early Americans that show how many people they enslaved…. And there is no harm in accepting that shame.” 

There is a lot of harm. For starters, it isn’t true. Slavery did not play a key role in the making of the American economic juggernaut; this is one of the many lies propagated by the 1619 Project, which the Smithsonian has closely tied itself to. The museum claims, for example, in wall texts and didactics, that the “the race-based system of slavery was fundamental to the founding of the United States,” that “the national economy relied upon slavery,” and that “profits from the sale of enslaved humans and their labor laid the economic foundation for Western Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas.” 

These are misconceptions propagated by the 1619 Project’s gross overestimation of the value of cotton to the US economy in the first half of the 19th century. As historians, including Leftist and liberal ones, have explained, the 1619 Project relied on the work of the Cornell academic Edward Baptist, who wrongly miscounted, and “with a wave of his wand” multiplied by a factor of 10 cotton’s share of the economy in 1836, from 5% to “almost half of the economic activity of the United States.” Historian Phillip Magness, who has also analyzed the numbers, has argued that the exaggeration of cotton’s impact has been intended to serve the political purpose of anti-capitalism. 

The Smithsonian’s swing to insurgent mode has dovetailed with the tenure of Secretary Bunch, who was the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture from 2005 to 2019, and has since been head of the entire institution. This evolution kicked into high gear in 2020, the year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. And other museums have followed suit, especially the Smithsonian’s neighbors on the National Mall.

The National Gallery of Art’s mission statement was an early casualty. In October 2020, at the height of the woke revolution, an anonymous letter, which claimed the signatures of current and previous employees, began to circulate, calling the gallery “the last plantation on the national mall.” “White supremacy,” fumed the letter writers, “is written into the gallery’s mission statement, which calls for the literal preservation of US history.” (The “literal” preservation of history — imagine a national museum doing that?). The writers demanded action: “We call for the NGA to rewrite its mission in understanding the foundation of the nation and its art collection in racial capitalism.” The letter further demanded an apology from the Gallery “to all BIPOC, LGBTQ, and womyn-identifying former and current employees.”

The National Gallery of Art folded like a lawn chair. In May 2021, it ditched the old Mellon-isms in favor of “inclusive” language that transformed the gallery from “national” to “international.” A new mission statement affirmed that “the National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.” 

As early as 2014, two years before the new African American museum first opened, Bunch started acting in symphony with BLM, ordering his staff to collect debris left behind by the thousands who rioted in Ferguson, Mo., after police shot Michael Brown. According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, Bunch “charged the museum’s curators and specialists with the task of documenting the Black Lives Matter movement. They needed to collect artifacts and ephemera of the campaign.” He did the same in Baltimore a year later, after Freddie Gray died there while in police custody, and riots again engulfed Charm City. 

In 2020, when the disturbances spread nationwide, Bunch sent a team of no fewer than nine curators from three different museums — he was by then at the helm of the whole Smithsonian — to Lafayette Square in front of the White House, where protesters had set fire to the basement of St. John’s Episcopal Church the day before. There, the specialists were to “collect mementos from the historic protests over George Floyd’s death,” so Bunch could store it in his museums’ vaults, as The Washington Post put it.

The Smithsonian explained that it had sent curators “to collect and preserve the expressions of protest and hope” because “the tragic killing of George Floyd has spurred a transformative time in U.S. history.” Thus, “the Smithsonian Institution is collecting today so that the world, in the present and future, can understand.” Smithsonian curators then fanned out across America digging for the new museum gold — or what people could reasonably call, well, trash. “Staffers will hunt down buttons, banners, hats and T-shirts, from the streets of Washington and from other cities where the protests have upended daily life and forced an unprecedented reckoning with the role of police,” explained the Post.

Everywhere BLM rioted, Bunch sent his specialists to collect the paraphernalia the rioters had declined to put in garbage bins and left behind to litter our streets. Or, to put it another way, the head of our main national museums embarked on a mission to record the trashing of America, both literally and figuratively, so he could transmit it to future generations.

Bunch was essentially forcing a national institution to join an insurrection against that nation. BLM’s founders sought the transformation of America, not reforms that improved race relations. “Our laws, economy, education institutions and legal systems are infected by institutionalized racism. It is going to take complete transformation — at all branches of government — to change the fate of this country,” wrote BLM founder Patrisse Cullors and activist Darnell Moore in The Guardian, while Ferguson burned. BLM activist Alicia Garza told Maine progressives five years later that “we’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country…. We all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society.” 

If pressed to put a definitive stamp on the moment when the Smithsonian switched roles from nation-preserver to nation-wrecker, one would have to pick 2019, when Bunch threw the Smithsonian behind the 1619 Project. He ordered his scholars to start curating and contributing materials for the scheme to rewrite American history, and to even co-author parts of it. He was explicit that he intended to use the Smithsonian to legitimize the 1619 Project, and celebrated that “everybody … saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it.”

The 1619 Project sought to shift America’s birthday from 1776, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to 1619, when a Portuguese ship arrived in today’s Virginia with a group of Angolans, the first slaves according to the project’s architects. This new birthday put a curse on America, making it appear irredeemably tainted by slavery from the start. The New York Times Magazine, originators of the project, have been explicit that its goal was, “to reframe the country’s history.” They were, subsequently and under enormous pressure from mainstream liberal historiography, forced to retract some of the project’s core claims. But that didn’t put an end to the Smithsonian’s devotion to the revisionist, ahistorical experiment.

All the Smithsonian institutions have succumbed to the woke virus under Bunch. Many exhibits at the National Museum of American History seem intended also to make Americans feel ashamed — of ill treatment of immigrants, of the unequal rewards of capitalism, of westward expansion, take your pick — and none makes you feel proud of an American story that the historian Paul Johnson described as “one of human achievement without parallel.” 

The National Museum of Natural History has recast its exhibits from the perspective of climate change, a perspective that targets capitalism. The National Museum of the American Indian has a classroom-resources website for grades four through 11 that discusses the ways that Indian tribes were pillaged and robbed, starting with the actions of George Washington.

Even museums that the Smithsonian hasn’t built yet, like the planned Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino, show every sign that they will be outposts of national wreckage. 

Bunch is a canny political operator. But he is now on a collision course with Trump. Haley and Vought wrote in their letter last month that “the American people will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history, one which is justifiably proud of our country’s accomplishments and record.” According to the Times, Bunch wrote to staff that it would be impossible to turn over the documents in the specified time frame.

To return to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, the Smithsonian officials are not like the Chinese nationalists, collecting treasures to preserve for posterity, but more like the rampaging communist partisans. Our version of the Red Guards may not be vandalizing the works of Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, John Singer Sargent, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, or Andrew Wyeth, but they are preventing Americans’ ability to learn about the nation by interacting with them. Visitors are accosted by wall didactics with sneering lessons on “settler colonialism” and “systemic racism,” meant to discourage pride in the United States. 

National shrines should not be in the business of inspiring shame, even as they might prompt thoughtful, balanced self-criticism. The transmission of heritage across the generations is what a national museum is for, and America needs museums to take up this mission. Otherwise, American culture will not long survive.

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