President Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order has been the source of much consternation and caterwauling among academic elites. “The cretin,” they cry, “wants to whitewash history. He is denying the pain of slavery. He doesn’t understand ‘art,’” and so on, in predictable fashion.

The Associated Press notes, accusingly, the “executive order cites the National Museum of African American History and Culture by name and argues that the Smithsonian as a whole is engaging in a ‘concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history,’” with a “’corrosive … divisive, race-centered ideology.’” Naturally, “Civil rights advocates, historians and Black political leaders sharply rebuked Trump.” Morehouse history professor Clarissa Myrick-Harris speculated that soon no one will ever know that slavery or Jim Crow existed. “Race historian” Ibram X. Kendi called Trump’s order “a literal attack on Black America itself.” The Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clarke and former NAACP President Ben Jealous concurred.

The New York Times predictably reported, “Mr. Trump’s order criticized the African American Museum because it had “proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture.’” Yes, “the museum did include a worksheet with those claims as part of a new Talking About Race online portal’” in 2020. Treating the document as one-off, the Times pointed out that Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian’s current secretary, “ordered it removed,” after “it drew criticism.” “‘I think the document itself was wrong and flawed,’ he told a congressional oversight committee in 2023,” adding, “‘it’s important for the Smithsonian to help the country grapple with questions of race.’”

Actually, the “criticism,” including a letter to Bunch from Senator Josh Hawley came all the way back in July 2020. But in November 2024, I found the “whiteness” poster still on the website, alongside “Deconstructing White Privilege,” a video by Robin DiAngelo, a “whiteness studies” scholar of questionable merit. (In January 2021, “poet” Kevin Young succeeded Bunch at the African American Museum; Young, it was just discovered, has been on a leave of absence since March 14.)

But racism is also the theme at the Smithsonian Art Museum, as a sculpture exhibition called “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” indicates. Zachary Small at The New York Times made it seem as if Trump’s main objection was that the show “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct” and quoting the Smithsonian, “‘Race is a human invention.’” Actually, the objection is to the Smithsonian’s claim that race is “used to establish and maintain systems of power,” including through “sculpture” that promotes “scientific racism.” But Small gets in a reference to Nazism from “Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written about scientific racism.” Small writes, “pseudoscientific attempts to create a hierarchy of races with white people at the top were seen ‘in places like Nazi Germany or within the eugenics movement.’”

The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse in her preachy account of her four hours at the Art Museum, wrote “On my way to visit the corrosive art that I cannot imagine Trump has actually seen, I dropped in on a school tour.” A guide was explaining to sixth graders that the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington before them was one of “multiple versions of this portrait in existence.” Hesse comments, “They’re all just rough drafts that got closer and closer to the real thing, as the artist tried his best to capture this complicated man, this founder of our country, this enslaver, this hero.” Hesse postulates: “That is how we tell the story of America. Together.”

Hesse “made it, finally, to ‘The Shape of Power’” and “spent 14 minutes with “Las Twines”: “Life-size, hyperrealistic sculptures of two little girls—the twins—sharing a swing. They were dressed identically in communion dresses and wore boxing gloves featuring Puerto Rican flags, but one had blonde hair and light skin and the other was dark-skinned with dark hair. They stared placidly ahead, while museum visitors like me were left to stare back and ponder how the world might treat these two girls …” Obviously, “The Shape of Power” is political art, or propaganda, something not to be appreciated for its universal appeal but, instead, for its approved message—unlike, say, Rembrandt.

Similarly, the Smithsonian’s Portrait Gallery features several portraits of Angela Davis and an exhibition, “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance.”

Trump is continuing his efforts to remove ideology from our institutions, as I reported in November. He began at the end of his impeachment-beleaguered first term, with the White House Conference on American History on Constitution Day 2020, when he went after “propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn,” and said, correctly, that the 1619 Project falsely teaches “our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.” The initial project, a special issue of The New York Times Magazine, has expanded into an industry of spin-off books, films, curricula, and high-paying speaking gigs for its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The taxpayer-supported Smithsonian Institution helped by serving as partner in developing the 1619 Project’s newspaper supplement and hosted a symposium featuring Hannah-Jones on Oct. 30, 2019. The month before, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian sponsored two teach-ins for educators. The “Indigenous Peoples’ Day Curriculum Teach-In” utilized An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a spin-off of communist historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. As I explained back then, both “teach-ins” were joint efforts of the Smithsonian and D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice. The Zinn Education Project provided classroom resources, including materials to “abolish Columbus Day.”

In 2021, the Smithsonian Magazine announced that the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History would be featuring a kick-off for Black History Month on Feb. 2 “with a book discussion with authors and scholars Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain on their newly released book Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019.” Kendi and Blain focused on “slavery, reconstruction and segregation and their continuing impact on the United States.” They would be joined “by several contributors to the book,” including Peniel Joseph and Annette Gordon Reed. And it was not the first time that Kendi had been hosted at the Smithsonian.

The Black History Month celebration also featured “A Seat at the Table,” described as “an interactive program for participants to consider challenging questions about … race, justice and mass incarceration in the United States”; “Artists at Home,” for students; weekly “‘Black joy, history and culture’ virtual events” for children; “a discussion about race and medicine with educators from the museum and the National Portrait Gallery”; and a digital exhibition about Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist “inspired” by Communism (though a member only “for a short time”).

But don’t expect to see a celebration of Booker T. Washington or a mention of George Schuyler there. A display featuring Black Panthers, hip-hop, Black Lives Matter, and Anita Hill was chosen over an exhibit of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. As Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation reveals, the planned Latino museum, under Bunch’s direction, would be just as ideological.

Additionally, the museum has collaborated in pseudo-academic projects (including by 1619 Project contributor Anthea Butler) that target Trump and his supporters, for example, by presenting the Jan. 6, 2021, protest as a violent attempt by white “Christian Nationalists” to subvert the election.

The New York Times recognizes that Lonnie Bunch is in the “hot seat,” but provides cover by perpetuating his claims that he did not know about the “whiteness” posters or drag shows.

But Lonnie Bunch clearly has been using his position to advance his own ideological beliefs in the 1619 narrative and Black Lives Matter. He is ignoring the mission of the Smithsonian: the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” through scientific, technological, and cultural collections and events. It is not “important for the Smithsonian to help the country grapple with questions of race,’” as he maintains. In fact, that statement should be grounds for his dismissal.