On August 19, 2025, President Donald Trump continued to increase his campaign against the Smithsonian Museum’s exhibits on American history. Trump stated in a Truth Social post, that, “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,” The Smithsonian institution responded that the exhibit, “was to help a nation understand itself — an impossible task without the full recognition of the horrors of slavery.”
Trump’s comment came five days after the White House declared an unexpected review on the Smithsonian Institution, leaving the institution barely any time to prepare. “Exhibits at the Smithsonian take years of planning and are heavily evaluated by teams of scholars and curatorial experts before they make their debut”, Janet Marstine, a museum ethics expert explained. By giving the museum a short amount of time to prepare, the Smithsonian Institution’s set up for failure. The Smithsonian Institution independently runs the majority of the public museums, this review run by Trump intended to focus on public-facing content, remove divisive narratives, and restore confidence in shared cultural institutions.
Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump lawyer, repeated Trump’s comment on Wednesday saying she noticed, “an overemphasis on slavery.” Halligan later explained there should show more of an emphasis on how far America came from slavery. Lonnie Bunch, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution since 2019, has made numerous comments about the importance of educating people about slavery, “We are unable as a nation to understand itself without acknowledging the horrors of slavery.”
On March 27, 2025, Trump signed an executive order, putting Vice President JD Vance in charge of controlling the government’s spending on exhibits not aligning with the administration’s agenda. The executive order explained that, “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to divisive narratives.” However, the Smithsonian Museum does not consider itself as an executive branch agency, questioning whether or not the Trump administration owns the authority or ability to control its exhibits.
