Donald Trump Orders Smithsonian To Re-Revise All The History
Make America Confederate Again, too.
Donald Trump opened yet another squirmish yesterday in his fascist Culture Wars on American institutions, issuing an executive order that purports to “[Restore] Truth and Sanity to American History” by ordering the Smithsonian Institution to teach only the good stuff about America, which has always been just and right and perfect except when Democrats stole elections.
The order instructs Vice President JD Vance, who by law is one of 17 members of the Smithsonian’s board of regents, to “work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo,” because, the order lies, Joe Biden came in and made the Smithsonian, and indeed all American history curricula everywhere, all woke, all by himself.
Trump also orders his administration to work with Congress to start screening appropriations for the Smithsonian to make sure that future funding will ban exhibits that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race, or promote ideologies inconsistent with Federal law,” so there’ll be no more nonwhite people in history, and probably no mention of the threat of climate change to endangered species at the National Zoo, among other allegedly illegal topics. Also, the American Women’s History Museum will be forbidden from mentioning trans women, ever.
And in a broad order to the Interior Department, Trump hereby demands the return of Confederate monuments and heroes to historic battlefields and national parks, or as the order has it, the Secretary shall
restore Federal parks, monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties that have been improperly removed or changed in the last five years to perpetuate a false revision of history or improperly minimize or disparage certain historical figures or events.
What kind of monster would improperly disparage a bunch of goddamn traitors and losers? Good thing Tennessee’s late crazy-ass Nathan Bedford Forrest statue was on private land, huh?
On that note, we should also add that state and local governments removed the vast majority of Confederate monuments that have come down, so Trump’s order won’t do dick about those. Only federal properties.
Bizarrely, the orders to the Interior Department specify that historical sites be reviewed for changes made after “January 1, 2020,” even though Trump was still in office then. Perhaps the idea is that nobody ever questioned the rightness of American history before the murder of George Floyd later that year?
Even websites or plaques mentioning that the Holy Founders held human beings in slavery might have to be removed, because the order bans any “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times)[.]” Instead, they must only “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
The order is long on grievance and short on anything that can actually be acted on, because as historians and others are already pointing out, presidents don’t actually have much power over the Smithsonian. The vice president is on the board, but not in charge of it — he has only one vote. A Smithsonian webpage explains its unique legal status as a public-private educational and cultural institution was designed by Congress to insulate it from political pressure, noting that “courts have held that the Smithsonian is not an agency or authority of the Government as those terms are used in certain laws applicable to executive branch agencies.”
True, that was allegedly the organizational structure for the US Institute of Peace, too, and we saw how that turned out. But the Smithsonian is a tad bigger, with “21 museums, 21 libraries, 14 education and research centers, a zoo,” and more than 200 other affiliated facilities and landmarks all over the country. Seizing control would require more than a bunch of DOGE dipshits threatening a security company to get a copy of a building key.
Still, there’s no telling what Trump will try to get away with, especially given his obsessive grievances over Joe Biden, diversity, and education generally, which he considers a pernicious force driven by Americans who hate America. That’s reflected in some of the ranting in the accompanying “fact sheet,” which gripes that
In the last decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted effort to rewrite American history and force our nation to adopt a factually baseless ideology aimed at diminishing American achievement.
Hilariously, even that complaint is revisionist history, since I’ve seen rightwingers complaining since the Reagan administration that historians and teachers at every level have been out to make America look bad — and such complaints go back well before I was old enough to be paying attention. It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now, but there’s always a buck or a vote or both to be had in calling honesty about history some kind of treason.
Take for instance this specific complaint in the order:
The American Art Museum currently features an exhibit that purports to address how “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and claims that the United States has “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”
Well, yes, that’s pretty damn true, and a perfectly valid point. We should also add that we couldn’t actually find those particular quotes at the exhibit’s website, or indeed anywhere on the web prior to yesterday’s executive order. Maybe they’re on a card next to an exhibit, or in the catalog for the exhibit, published by Princeton University Press.
The site itself simply states that the exhibit looks at how sculpture “has shaped and reflected attitudes and understandings about race in the United States,” which again, yeah, sure does. Look at the Jim Crow dedication speeches for those glorious Confederate statues, for instance, which are full of praise for how the monuments will do the sacred work of preserving white supremacy. Those speeches by big strong Confederate veterans insist, with tears in their manly racist eyes, “That’s OUR history, Sir.”
It remains to be seen how far Trump will get in his attempt to fuck with a great cultural treasure like the Smithsonian, although Crom knows he’ll try. He could even do some real damage in his drive to establish a more nationalistic, fascist version of history.
But Americans are getting increasingly loud in their opposition to Donald Trump, and the creepy Christian Nationalist version of America is only popular with a small part of the country. Americans pretty unambiguously love the Smithsonian, and it shouldn’t be difficult to motivate crowds to show up to defend the “Nation’s Attic” from a bunch of creeps who want to lie about our history and give it a false “patriotic” gloss.
We’re partial to the view of one of the greatest American patriots who ever lived, Mark Twain, who said that patriotism
is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a foot of land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting of a longline of successive “owners” who each in turn, as “patriots” with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did — and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.
Damn right, Mr. Clemens.
[White House (Executive Order) / White House (“Fact” sheet) / Civil War Memory / Smithsonian American Art Museum]
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Making sure art and history that hurts your racist sensibilities is erased from the public square is exactly the thing a "free speech absolutist" would do, don'tcha think?
Boy, Orwell would have a freakin' field day with this bunch.
"Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it"
- George Bernard Shaw