The White House Says the Smithsonian Can't Be Trusted With American History. Governments That Seize the Story Have a Record.

On July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a 162-page report accusing the Smithsonian of “extreme political activism” and a “radical view of American history.” It says the institution has been captured by an “activist ideology” and “cannot be trusted” to tell the country’s story, PBS reported. The Smithsonian answered that it has served the public for 180 years with “nonpartisan and independent scholarship.”

The report is not a stray complaint. It is the enforcement document for a policy already in motion.

An Order to Purge “Improper Ideology”

The report builds on Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which Trump signed on March 31, 2025. The order directs Vice President Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to remove “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the museums, research centers, and the National Zoo. It also instructs the American Women’s History Museum to “not recognize men as women in any respect.”

The July report faults the National Museum of American History for too little attention to the founders and too much on gender and race. The through-line is a single claim: that the government, not curators, should decide which parts of the past are acceptable.

Who Decides What Is “Improper”

That is the whole question, and it has already been tested. Under the same executive order, the administration stripped exhibits on slavery, civil rights, and Indigenous history from national parks. A federal judge ordered them restored and found the removals arbitrary and unlawful.

A museum that must clear its exhibits with a president’s office is no longer teaching history. It is delivering a message, and the message changes with whoever holds power.

What the Record Shows

Historians say this pattern is familiar, and the data is grim. Governments consolidating power have repeatedly seized control of museums and public history to define who belongs in the nation. Nazi Germany offers the most documented case. In 1933 the regime created the Reich Chamber of Culture to control who could produce art, and it burned books it called un-German.

Four years later came the purge of the museums. A commission seized 5,238 works in two weeks, part of more than 16,000 works pulled from German collections. The regime hung 650 of them in a 1937 “Degenerate Art” show meant to mock modern work as sick and foreign, and roughly two million people filed through.

Government control of public history is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes, not democracies.

American Historical Association, defending the Smithsonian, 2026

The American Historical Association and hundreds of scholars have signed statements making that point about the current pressure on the Smithsonian.

Where the Line Actually Is

A 162-page report and an executive order are not a bonfire, and saying so keeps the comparison honest. Exhibits are legitimately debated all the time, and a museum can get a display wrong. Curators revise their own work constantly.

The line is not whether history gets argued. It is who holds the pen. When professional historians and curators shape exhibits through scholarship, that is a museum. When a president’s office rules which history is “anti-American” and orders it removed, that is a message with the government’s name on it.

The first is normal. The second is the pattern historians are warning about.

What You Can Do Now

Use the letter below to tell your senators and representative to defend the Smithsonian’s independence, oppose politically directed review of its content, and reject any funding conditions that would force it. Congress funds the institution and appoints members of its Board of Regents.
Call your members of Congress at (202) 224-3121. Ask whether they believe a president’s office should decide which parts of American history a museum is allowed to show, and ask them to say so on the record.
Show up for the institution. Visit the Smithsonian, which is free, and support the American Historical Association and museum professionals defending independent scholarship against political control.