Trump wants to limit U.S. history to the shiny parts. It won't work.

Washington Post

16-04-2025

Developers reshape reality. They dress up the drab and market it as the unique. Donald Trump spent about half a century hawking condos, casinos and all sorts of middling products that he sold as spectacular, with some success (and plenty of failure, too).
Now, he's taking a product with nearly 250 years' worth of blemishes and beauty spots and he's remarketing it in his usual style — as utter perfection, made possible exclusively by him. The product is the history of the United States, which earned its remarkable place in the cavalcade of nations expressly because its troubles and trials forged its strength and stability.
But in the Trump catalogue, there are only shiny objects, and so the museums of the Smithsonian — home to Dorothy's ruby slippers but also to bills of sale for human enslaved people — are now in cover-up mode, under 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History' orders to remove anything the president might consider 'improper ideology.' The nation's attic, cluttered and messy like the country it reflects, is henceforth to display only 'the remarkable achievements of the United States.'
There's a problem with Trump's impulsive orders, even beyond their legal, constitutional, moral and political flaws: They often stem from baseless assertions. Just as Trump, without having set foot in the place during his years in Washington, proposed to ransack the Kennedy Center because its programming was insufficiently middlebrow for his taste, now he's coming after the Smithsonian's presentation of U.S. history without knowing what the museums actually show.
So, let's wander through the National Museum of American History, one of my favorite branches of the Smithsonian. It's the vast repository on the National Mall of the artifacts of our common past: former president Abraham Lincoln's top hat, the original Star-Spangled Banner, a baseball signed by Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, but also the manacles that kept Kunta Kinte chained up in 'Roots' and Ku Klux Klan hoods, posters and sheet music.
Had Trump actually visited, he might have seen that his vision of the country (to the extent that he has one) has been on view at the museum for decades.
The culture police of the Trump administration pretend they are the first to correct excesses at the nation's great institutions, removing books at the Naval Academy, canceling shows at the Kennedy Center, squelching scholarship at the Wilson Center.
But we have been here before: Every generation brings some effort to hide our misdeeds or deny our history. Under former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, a drive to give corporate powers a louder voice changed how some museums tell the country's story. Today, the American History museum features the General Motors Hall of Transportation, the Mars (as in candy bars) Hall of American Business, a housing exhibit sponsored by the National Association of Realtors and exhibitions made possible by ExxonMobil and Monsanto.
The history museum is an unintentional display of the culture wars over how to tell our story. Its offerings range from decades-old shows that celebrate U.S. presidents and train locomotives to newer exhibits that are thoroughly bilingual, brimming with left-wing jargon and liberal takes on the American past.
An exhibit previewing the forthcoming National Museum of the American Latino — focusing 'on diverse stories of resistance' — presents Puerto Ricans' story as a tale of 'their colonial relationship with the United States,' without mentioning that Puerto Ricans have voted multiple times to endorse options including statehood or their current commonwealth status. Independence was never the top choice.
The museum is also a celebration of an idealized America, one in which it's possible to mount a show about American enterprise that barely mentions slavery. Yet one floor up, an exhibit about American democracy puts the slavery debate center stage, connecting moral questions over human bondage with contemporary struggles over voting rights and the role of women.
Text describing a Chicago Transit Authority streetcar from 1959 says nothing about racial division in that city, but a group of middle school kids from Ohio who ran into that car during my visit knew in their bones what the streetcar symbolized:
'Yo, get to the back of the bus!' one boy called out.
'You can't sit here!' another piped in.
Rancor about race is so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that we go there even when the powers that be try to muffle reality.
What Trump's culture warriors can't accept is that Americans have been fitfully but satisfyingly engaged in debate about the country's character from the very start. Even in its celebratory exhibit on American enterprise, the museum highlights the Founders' discord over how to shape the country, with Alexander Hamilton favoring a focus on manufacturing and Thomas Jefferson pushing for an agrarian society.
Parts of the museum treat visitors like thinking adults and parts dismiss them as dimwits who need to be told how great their country is. Now, Trump seeks to homogenize the place.
He has always believed that if he can control the messaging, he will shape reality. He believed it as a man who wanted to erect the tallest tower on Fifth Avenue, so he renumbered the floors in Trump Tower, turning the 58th story into the 68th floor. He has sued the authors of books about him, sacked underlings who brought him bad news, sought to strip licenses from those who broadcast chronicles of his misdeeds.
Now, at the Smithsonian, he intends to rewrite history. To an extent, he can. Fear that he might do far worse often results in near-instant compliance.
This power grab is not the overreach that will deliver the nation from its populist spasm. It will likely take a rough economic passage to nudge the pendulum back toward a more honest and trusting society. But enough Americans instinctively resent being told what to think that the cynical manipulation of the Smithsonian will produce some backlash. Our history, warts and all, teaches us that.