Trump Orders Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Museums Before Nation’s 250th Anniversary
The super-woke Smithsonian is getting a long overdue America First makeover.
In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, aimed at preparing the nation to celebrate its 250th anniversary in 2026.
Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.
This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.
Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.
As a result of that directive, the administration has ordered a comprehensive review of current and planned exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, with the explicit aim of assessing the quality of educational materials, digital platform information, and social media content to “assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”
The White House’s letter directs eight Smithsonian museums to turn over materials within 30 days about any exhibits related to America’s 250th anniversary, other exhibits, and educational materials.
Within 120 days of receiving the letter, the museums are ordered to “begin implementing content corrections where necessary,” the letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch says.
The Smithsonian Institution has been a target of Trump’s, who earlier this year signed an executive order targeting the group of museums, writing that they had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
The letter on Tuesday says, “As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Nation’s founding, it is more important than ever that our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.”
I appreciate President Trump’s response 🔥🇺🇸
Audit the Smithsonian. Open their basements. Digitize and make ALL records public! https://t.co/4Nlf9Dc7TY pic.twitter.com/zkmNf2p8RE
— Jimmy Corsetti (@BrightInsight6) August 13, 2025
To say that the leftists are upset at the move is an understatement. The New York Times asserts that Trump is “imposing his will”.
The review, which will begin with eight of the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, is the latest attempt by President Trump to try to impose his will on the Smithsonian, which has traditionally operated as an independent institution that regards itself outside the purview of the executive branch.
And CNN panelist Scott Jennings had to remind an apoplectic colleague that they were cheering for statue removals during BLM summer (Flashback – Egyptologist explains how to pull down monuments).
The last time we talked about reviewing historical exhibits was when liberal mobs tore down historical statues across the country.
The people who are the angriest about Trump’s Smithsonian Museum review are the people who cheered that on. Spare me your outrage. pic.twitter.com/cfPz4Vfd2a
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) August 13, 2025
However, the Smithsonian has earned this comprehensive review. The years under Obama, with its Critical Race Theory and social justice orientation, combined with the Diversity-Equity-Inclusion inanity of the Biden era, have sullied the reputation of this national treasure.
Back in 2016, there was the monumentally stupid and racist “White Culture” exhibit.
It also singles out the National Museum of African American History and Culture, saying that the museum “has proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture’.” The museum opened in 2016 in Washington as former President Barack Obama, America’s first black president, was leaving office.
I didn’t, right up until Leftists at the Smithsonian put this in their “white culture” display. https://t.co/ACQdEYf2TA pic.twitter.com/FIu5T64717
— Amy Curtis (@RantyAmyCurtis) August 13, 2025
Back in 2022, there was an outcry that preview exhibitions and staffing choices for an upcoming Latino museum promoted a “Marxist” and “victimhood” narrative about Hispanic Americans.
And the Trump team had to force the Smithsonian to cancel a show featuring trans entities in the National Portrait Gallery.
BREAKING: Woke artist Amy Sherald just canceled her show at the National Portrait Gallery after @VP JD Vance placed pressure on the Smithsonian to eliminate leftwing indoctrination.
Her display was expected to include a revision of the Statue of Liberty as a black trans woman… pic.twitter.com/HXvRJVIEgH
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 24, 2025
The Smithsonian is long overdue for an America First makeover.
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Comments
I read an article 20 years back or more that the Smithsonian has well over million artifacts. The inventory will have to be all hands on deck to complete. How many leftist resistors will comply? How many will quit because they have to change out displays to showcase American Exceptionalism? It’s well past time this was done.
“Imagine what’s been boxed up in their basement for the last hundred years”
I’m getting vertigo trying to imagine the basement of America’s Attic.
I started going to DC in the mid 90s, 1-4 week stays, flying in and out the middle of the week. Most of Saturday and Sunday were spent at various Smithsonian museums. I did this for a bit over 20 years. I have not been back since that time. I just took a quick look and found this: “Diversity in Invention: To expand our knowledge of the full range of inventors, we have made it a priority to document and feature women and minority inventors from the past and present”
I bet that the Smithsonian is full of Affirmative and DEI incompetents, they need a vigorous house cleaning.
They have 154.8 million objects in their collections between all the museums. From 1978-1983, the entire collection was counted with each item being assigned it’s own barcode. After that, they would assign barcodes to new objects accepted into the collections but there are no regular inventories. I’m sure that Trump was made aware of the deficiencies in our national museums and that’s why he demanded an inventory within 75 days. You’ve got to know the directors, curators and registrars went into immediate hysterical panic mode (more so than usual). Accountability is kryptonite to leftists.
It was 14 years ago when I visited as many of the museums in Washington DC as I could. Wore my feet right slap out. The rot was already evident then.
I have toured the Biltmore estate near Ashville NC twice. Sometime between the first and second visits, every one of the many (dozens? maybe 100?) hunting trophies had been removed. They were actual physical artfacts of the house that someone decided to “disappear”. That is revising history, and is despicable.
The same happened to Monticello. When we visited in 1999, it was mostly about Jefferson’s noble qualities: his statesmanship, fierce dedication to liberty, diplomacy, inventive mechanical genius, and architectural prowess; with the slave quarters and historical story presented fairly, in context and to scale. After the Obama years, many of the original, inspirational exhibits had been removed (or if too big to remove, like the architectural features themselves, had their signage removed), and the bulk of the exhibits was reduced to slavery, slavery, slavery.
“To say that the leftists are upset at the move is an understatement.”
That is how I knew I would approve of the new policy.
In spite of the woke rot that permeates too much of American life today, you can travel to the Air & Space Museum Annex out at Dulles and actually touch the Enola Gay, an artifact of an America that was not afraid to win a just war unapologetically by any means necessary.
I hope that – in this cleanup – the racial remark on the description card for the DC-7 cabin diorama is removed. That is at the air and space museum in turn, not at Dulles.
The Enola Gay display was an early harbinger of what was to follow.
https://boundarystones.weta.org/2025/08/08/how-exhibit-enola-gay-was-decades-long-struggle-smithsonian
Amazing link. Thanks. I had no idea of the complexity, although I had heard of the original turmoil.
Too many cooks …
dont keep calling it jim crow
its deshaun markitas now
get out of our streets we run the show
Web search fails. Who the heck are you talking about?
“Her display was expected to include a revision of the Statue of Liberty as a black trans woman and another revision of the iconic WW2 sailor’s kiss on V-J Day as two gay black men kissing.”
No cultural appropriation there. Obviously. It only works one way silly rabbit.
An inventory of the assets/contents wouldn’t be a bad idea either. Then work out ‘lending’ agreements with other museums to get them displayed somewhere on a rotation so that we don’t end up with items sitting in a warehouse for decades unseen and poorly remembered by the general public.
I went to DC in 2017 and was appalled at how at every major stop, from Lincoln’s assignation, Arlington cemetery, it was all being lecture on racism 24/7.
And don’t you know, America was built by slaves!!
Appears European immigrants had nothing to do with the building and culture of America
My hope is that crap has got to stop also!
Let me know when they find the Ark of the Covenant in one of the museums, I’m sure it’s been labeled as an arab historical object since the muslim/leftist love to erase Jewish history.
“Back in 2016, there was the monumentally stupid and racist “White Culture” exhibit.”
Yes, and it has been one of the finest weapons in the quiver of US conservatives. There’s nothing quite so productive as trotting this little gem out to own the screeching of the type of people who originally wrote it. It is one of the biggest self-owns of wokeism, a mea culpa manifesto to rival serial killer Pee Wee Gaskin’s autobiography.
Thank you, Smithsonian.
Museums are run according to politics and they have been for years. It’s been much worse in the last 20 years since the left captured the AAM which accredits museums. To receive accreditation, they must work to actively “decolonize” their exhibits and their collections. While skipping accreditation is always an option, it’s much harder to obtain loans (objects not money) and big donors without it. This is why it’s so stupid for the right to cede control of the “arts” to the left. Politics is downstream from culture and if you want to fight leftism, you have to do it from the ground up.