The Smithsonian’s unresolved identity crisis gave the White House a lever over national memory

The White House has made the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History a target of its campaign against “ideological capture.” A 162-page July report catalogued disputed exhibits and training materials; an executive order directed the Interior Department to place warning signs outside the museum. The signs have not appeared, but Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch announced his departure on September 8 after describing the period as stressful.

The institution is formally independent of the executive branch. A 17-member board includes the chief justice, the vice-president, six members of Congress and nine private citizens. Financial dependence creates a different pressure point: the federal government supplies about 62% of the Smithsonian’s funding, more than $1bn a year. Threatened cuts can influence an institution the president cannot simply command.

ProPublica’s deeper contribution is to show that the vulnerability predates Trump. A 1999 conservative critique said the history museum lacked the country’s defining events and figures. A bipartisan 2002 commission likewise found no coherent narrative and recommended a chronological introduction combining achievement with failure. Curators instead organised the museum into thematic galleries, producing powerful objects and individual exhibits without resolving what story the whole institution tells.

That history does not validate political control over scholarship. It explains why selective examples—from speculative text about Benjamin Franklin’s household to a sexual-history display—could stand in for the entire museum. The next phase will be structural: several citizen seats on the board are vacant or soon expire, and the board will choose Bunch’s successor. The struggle is therefore not just over labels. It is over who gets to define the institutional process by which national history remains complex without becoming either partisan instruction or an incoherent collection of fragments.