On Tuesday the 19th of August, President Donald Trump escalated his campaign to dismantle “woke” ideologies. The White House started by conducting the first of a few intensive reviews of exhibits, materials, and information in each of the museums maintained by the Smithsonian Institution. This particular institution is in charge of managing and maintaining the nation’s major public museums including museums like, The National Museum of American History and The National Museum of African American History and Culture.
In a post on True Social, Trump announced, “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.”
As well as the True Social post, last week three of Trump’s aides wrote a letter directly to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie Bunch III, in which they reference Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. This particular Executive Order aims to dismantle racism by prohibiting expenses on exhibits and programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies” through any means necessary. The letter states, “This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” In this letter they also explain the four main focuses of the planned review, public facing content, cultural process, exhibition planning, collection use, and narrative standards. The letter makes a point of planning a main focus on reviewing exhibits for the 250th anniversary of The Declaration of Independence to ensure they follow the new expectations of the Federal Law.
Lonnie Bunch III, in the Smithsonian Magazine responded with, “the most important thing to remember in memorializing slavery is to humanize it. It can be easy to talk about the big numbers: 16 million people were shipped and sold—that is unimaginable. But if you zoom in on a single ship, a single story, you can grasp it on a human scale.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/19/politics/trump-slavery-museum-smithsonian
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/12/politics/smithsonian-exhibits-white-house-review
