He’s extremely unlikely to ever see any of them, but the White House has issued a list of exhibits and educational programs that are likely to irritate the president.
An angry article on the White House website, headlined “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian,” lists a series of perceived offenses from museums in the capital, ranging from flying the Progress Pride flag alongside the Stars and Stripes to showing a stop-motion animation of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The s--tlist follows President Donald Trump’s rant on Truth Social this week that the Smithsonian Institution is “OUT OF CONTROL” because it was fixated on showing “how bad slavery was” instead of focusing on “brightness.”
The president said he wanted museums to look to “the future” and claimed he was determined to root out what he called “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’”
He wrote, “I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities, where tremendous progress has been made.”
The president appears to be following through on his threat. The unsigned article was posted on Thursday and lists seven D.C. museums, all operated by the Smithsonian, with exhibits or practices that offend MAGA sensitivities.
Most of them touch on issues of race, gender, slavery, and immigration.
They include the National Museum of African American History and Culture covering white privilege, the National Portrait Gallery planning to show a painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty, and an exhibit at the American History Museum where migrants watch Independence Day fireworks “through an opening in the U.S.-Mexico border wall.”
Last month, Amy Sherald, who painted the “Trans Forming Liberty” art piece, was told it may trigger Trump and had been “informed that internal concerns had been raised” at the Portrait Gallery, which had decided not to show it.
Sherald added, “It’s clear that institutional fear shaped by a broader climate of political hostility toward trans lives played a role.”
Trump’s people also had an issue with a stop-motion drawing animation of Fauci, the country’s most eminent infectious diseases specialist, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. Fauci and Trump regularly clashed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the president calling Fauci a “disaster.”
The White House was also angered by an entire series commissioned to examine “American portraiture and institutional history… through the lens of historical exclusion,” and the National Museum of the American Latino highlighting “Latinos and Latinas with disabilities.”
They also did not like messaging from the National Museum of the American Latino suggesting that what unites Latinas and Latinos is “the Black Lives Matter movement.” The premise for one exhibit at the American History Museum examining the “myth” that the English who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 were colonists rather than pilgrims—also not a MAGA-friendly point of view.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Spokesperson Davis Ingle told The Washington Post, “As President Trump promised, the Trump Administration is committed to rooting out Woke and divisive ideology in our government and institutions.”
Davis continued, “Taxpayer money should not be used for things that pit Americans against one another. Our Smithsonian should exhibit history in an accurate, honest, and factual way.”
Trump’s special assistant in charge of overhauling the Smithsonian, Lindsey Halligan, told Fox News on Wednesday that museums need to look to the future, not the past.
“Our education system in general has been indoctrinated with political ideology,” Halligan said
“The Smithsonian is really a version of education. It is supposed to be a trust instrument; it has become more of a platform upon which the curators can push ideological narratives. We want to help it... represent our nation properly and truthfully.”
She added that while she felt slavery was “awful”, the Smithsonian museums had an “overemphasis” on that part of history.
“I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery,” Halligan said.
