President Trump has aggressively pushed forward on reforming the Smithsonian Institution, starting with eight marquee museums located in the heart of Washington, D.C. Trump announced the reforms in a bold post on Truth Social, declaring, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
Instead of engaging with the substance of his critique, some are suggesting that Trump doesn’t think American slavery was bad. It’s a sideshow from the underlying point.
Shortly after his Truth Social post, the White House released an article titled, “President Trump is Right About the Smithsonian,” detailing twenty-two recent exhibits featured across various Smithsonian museums. These exhibits break two ways; they either depict the American founding or culture negatively—like describing them as being rooted in “colonialism”—or they portray left-wing activist causes as self-evidently good and virtuous. Examples include commemorating illegal border crossings and celebrating President Biden’s Title IX changes that allowed biological men to compete in women’s sports.
Earlier this year, I wrote about my own visit to the Entertainment Nation exhibit at the National Museum of American History. Instead of learning about the impressive history of American popular culture, I learned that 19th century circuses “expressed the colonial impulse to claim dominion over the world,” that the Phoenix Suns basketball team staged an on-court protest “in solidarity with the Latinx community” over immigration laws, and that Anthony Fauci was an “infectious disease superstar” who stood steadfastly by science “amidst a cacophony of misinformation and denial” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
[RELATED: Trump’s Smithsonian Order Will Reclaim America’s Story from Leftist Activists]
While the history-oriented museums have drawn most of Trump’s ire, no museum is safe from radical curators intent on turning every piece of signage into a political statement. The Smithsonian Postal Museum, a more obscure Smithsonian located near Union Station in central D.C., stated in its Fiscal Year 2025 Congressional Justification that “for America’s upcoming 250th anniversary, the Museum will develop and publish a virtual exhibition exploring the history of voting by mail in the United States.” Expanding access to mail-in voting is a controversial practice that is ripe for abuse.
American history could be told as the hard-fought struggle for liberty and equality under the law, where every citizen has the right to enjoy the bread earned by their own labor, free from harassment or theft. Instead, taxpayers are bombarded with exhibits and rhetoric that distort those founding principles: liberty is recast to mean a world without borders, and equality under the law is twisted to mean men can be women.
And Americans pay handsomely to have their own history distorted. The Smithsonian is a prime example of how tax dollars are not just wasted, but used to push an ideology on the American people. Open the Books keeps an unprecedented database of public spending that can help inject reality back into the conversation with basic facts and figures.
The FY 2025 Congressional appropriation to the Smithsonian is about $1.1 billion. Entire exhibits can cost tens of millions of dollars. Documents obtained by Open the Books show the Entertainment Nation exhibit alone costs $18 million. Federal funding is often supplemented by donations from corporate and nonprofit donors, which can create obvious conflicts of interest if public messages are hijacked for private purposes.
A pandemic-related exhibit makes a good case in point.
The “Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World” exhibit at the Museum of Natural History discussed the “human-animal-environmental connection” of pathogen transmission in depth, with a particular focus on bats. The exhibit, running from 2018 to 2021, included materials that claimed COVID-19 was likely of zoonotic origin. One of the exhibit’s sponsors was the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that lost its ability to obtain federal grants in 2025. EcoHealth had failed to disclose risky “gain-of-function” virus research it was funding in China during the years leading up to the pandemic. EcoHealth Alliance denies wrongdoing and was another entity that promoted the zoonotic origin theory during the pandemic.
Not only do these dollars poison the public square by distorting truth, but they also provide salaries, recognition, and platforms for curators and experts in left-wing ideology to promote their views and gain professional status.
One such curator for the Entertainment Nation exhibit, Krystal Klingenberg, hosts a National Museum of American History podcast called “Collected.” The first season of the show, launched in 2022, “highlights why Black feminist critique remains crucial to understanding the times we are living in,” and covers topics like “Identity Politics,” “Black Feminism,” and “Self-Care.” In one episode on “Intersectionality,” a guest, Raquel Willis, a self-described “Black transgender woman in these here United States” and a “trans rights activist,” talks about why objectivity is impossible for “Black trans women” in journalism:
to be asked to be unbiased as a Black trans woman is for me to lay down and take up the mantle of white supremacy, and patriarchy, and classism, and all of these invisible values that exist, you know, and if we’re not adamantly pushing against them, we’re just supporting them.
Klingenberg agreed, stating:
When who you are is considered the status quo, as it is with white people, your positionality is not at odds with the system around you. People of color’s experiences disrupt the status quo, showing that the status quo is not universal.
Klingenberg earns $124,827 a year from her federal salary, according to Open the Books records.
Trump’s August letter to the Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III states that the administration will begin implementing the March executive order by focusing on public-facing content at eight museums in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of American Independence Day next year. The aim of the order is “to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
The curatorial and exhibition planning processes will also be reviewed, along with exhibit sponsors.
[RELATED: ‘Linguistic White Supremacy’: The Left’s New Crusade Against the English Language]
It’s understandable that public-facing content should take the highest priority. D.C. anticipates a record number of tourists for the 250th anniversary celebration, and the Smithsonian museums will be a highlight of any visit. But the ideological capture at the Smithsonian goes deeper than what the public can see at the exhibits and on their websites.
The left-wing “anti-colonial” mindset informs, for example, the National Museum of Natural History’s Shared Stewardship and Ethical Returns Program. This initiative, according to the Smithsonian’s FY 2025 Congressional Justification, is “proactively addressing the legacies of colonialism inherent in museum collections obtained during the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
The program “advances NMNH’s goals of decolonizing its collections … restoring cultural heritage and other materials obtained during an era of colonialism and pronounced power imbalances.” In other words, museum curators will be giving away pieces from the Smithsonian’s collections, which were established in 1846 through a gift by collector James Smithson. Today’s Smithsonian curators, who promoted an exhibit called “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” featuring childhood gender transitions, evidently feel moral superiority over their Victorian-era forebears.
The Smithsonian Institution boasts 21 museums, a National Zoo, fourteen research and education centers, and affiliations and partnerships with hundreds of other museums across the country and the world. Reforming the organization to its original intended purpose, “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men,” will be no small task.
Image of Raquel Willis on Wikimedia Commons.
