After Years of Woke Shows, MAGA Comes for the Smithsonian

Tough love, force, and deprogramming, and it won’t be pretty.

W ith 17 museums, a garden, the Archives of American Art, and a zoo, the Smithsonian is sprawling, eclectic, and in President Trump’s line of fire. His freshly minted executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” correctly states that there’s “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” That would be the 1619 Project and its many spinoffs. The EO, issued last week, prohibits, among other things, Smithsonian spending on exhibitions and programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law or policies.”

I can list a hundred reasons why the Smithsonian is stuck in a rut dividing Americans between oppressors and the oppressed. Here are a few.

In 2023, I wrote about the Museum of the American Latino’s first exhibition — ¡Presente! — still on view at the American History Museum, which lends it gallery space until the American Latino Museum’s new home is finished. ¡Presente! is conceited, dumb, pious, spitty, and deceitful. It enlists Code Pink, of all hate groups, as a guiding spirit. To be Latino in America means to be a victim, we’re told.

What are the exhibition’s goals? Certainly neither candor nor fact nor empowerment. The goal is to leave visitors, especially young people, resentful and embittered. The House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the new museum, understanding that ¡Presente! is a taste of things to come. Good, I thought. “Cojones” in action. It’s a waste of money. What happened? Smithsonian bigwigs cooed and flattered and sang “I’m Sorry” in Spanish. Appropriators folded like a cheap poncho. ¡Presente! is still there, as is a banner on the museum’s website headlined “Reckoning with Our Racial Past” along with a quote from Angela Davis, in her dotage, now the fake Dolores del Rio of acquitted accessories to murder. “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the entire world,” the FBI Ten Most Wanted fugitive turned tenured professor and millionaire tells us. “And you have to do it all the time.”

How does it feel, House Appropriations Committee, to have a stick poked in your eye?

Explaining its mandate, the Trump EO cites the horrifying 2020 “Talking About Race” portal that anchors the youth education program at the Museum of African American History and Culture.

In a section called “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture,” the museum said that “whiteness” — bad — includes objective, rational, linear thinking along with self-reliance, independence, hard work as the key to success, planning for the future, respect for the law and property, good grammar, marriage, and, most insulting of all, bland food. This program is a building block of DEI ideology as well as the mediocrity and failure that DEI pushers tacitly want. The museum yanked it and apologized when caught, but, let’s face it, the agenda simply went subterranean for a bit before sprouting everywhere.

Trump’s EO also cites The Shape of Power, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s new show that uses American sculpture “to invite dialogue and reflection on notions of power and identity,” as the museum tells us. It’s about how American sculpture and race intersect. I saw the show when I was in Washington last week and found it ranty and tendentious. “Don’t they know how to do anything but race, race, race?” I thought. The place, and that includes the Renwick Gallery, its sister museum, is captured. It’s hooked on victimhood. So, alas, is the National Portrait Gallery, another Smithsonian museum. The needle is stuck. The Smithsonian is an American treasure, but many of its components are on a woke treadmill.

Who you gonna call? Woke Busters.

The Executive Order empowers the vice president, a Smithsonian board member, and the director of the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it. I follow most of the Smithsonian’s art museums closely. These also include the Freer, the Sackler, the Cooper Hewitt in New York, and the Hirshhorn. Knowing the curatorial mind, I think that, insofar as the EO’s concerned, the first thing the museum staffs will do is ignore it and see what happens. They’ll say they don’t understand it. “Degrade shared American values?” That, they’ll say, is too vague, though the bottom line is “cut the woke crap.” The least delusional among them will get the point.

Both the vice president and OMB are too remote from day-to-day planning. Museums develop themes, select art, write labels, and prepare catalogues long before a show opens. Mounting an exhibition isn’t rocket science, but if you’re clueless, you’re clueless. You can’t enforce an EO like this from 40,000 feet. The EO specifies that Lindsey Halligan, a White House staffer and one of Trump’s lawyers during the interregnum, will manage the detox effort. She has no museum experience, so she and the curatorial class will be on different planets. There will be lots of ballistics going off, little if any of it productive.

The big problem isn’t at the zoo or the Air and Space Museum but in the art museums and the history museums, so I’d address them first. The museum directors are in charge of quality control. Those who are down the chain from the Smithsonian’s top brass have to get the message that museum programming needs to be recalibrated. They might not get it. Like the leaders of the National Portrait Gallery, they might be hopeless.

Why not imbed an experienced historian, whose portfolio is tracking what’s going on at the art and history museums, in the Smithsonian, reporting to the vice president and the OMB director? Monitoring staff hiring, exhibition proposals, labels, and catalogue essays is something a historian simpatico with the Trump EO ought to do. Basically, the museums would have enhanced supervision outside the regular Smithsonian network. This person should have plug-pulling muscle in cases where the art becomes a prop for Peter Pans, young and old, hectoring us about white supremacy, the climate, 1619, menstrual men, and the poor Palestinians. Art exhibitions about these topics and those revolving around them are, in my experience, boring, redundant, and shallow.

Left on its own, the Smithsonian won’t change a thing.

Enforcing the EO is part culture change, part deprogramming, part tough love, part forced march. Tears over a loss of autonomy? The Potomac might flood. No one’s a free agent in the government. It’s a sad, sad, sad reality. The Smithsonian Museum of American Art is looking for a new director. If the EO is to succeed, whoever gets the job can’t be bivouacked on the woke barricades. Again, left on its own, the Smithsonian will pick more of the same.

This isn’t a purge. It’s a restoration of curatorial standards that existed and thrived before the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter mass hypnosis, five years ago. If museums in the nonprofit sector want to do exhibitions catering to the Hate America First crowd, that’s their choice. If curators at the Smithsonian want to do these shows, exit, meet patootie.

I’d also suggest directing the art museums and the history museums to focus their 2026 programming on the country’s semiquincentennial. As far as I can tell, only the National History Museum is planning a big splash for America’s 250th birthday. Why? Possibly because some among the decision-makers in other museums hate the country and its values, possibly because some have no ideas, possibly because some think it will aggrandize MAGA, possibly because they don’t think the 250th is important. All of these are bad reasons not to celebrate the Declaration of Independence with gratitude, gusto, and reverence. As the 200th was a big deal — and I suppose you have to be an antique to remember this — so is the 250th.

Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian, is 72. I admire him for his heroic, transformational work and leadership in building the splendid African American Museum of History and Culture. The Smithsonian has 17 regents, or trustees; eight of them are there by virtue of their public offices, and nine are from the general citizenry. Serious change comes from the top, though I wonder how engaged the public officials — the Supreme Court’s chief justice, the vice president, and senators and representatives — are in the Smithsonian’s doings. Aren’t they busy with other things? Are the regent meetings ceremonial?

The Smithsonian launched a $2.5 billion comprehensive campaign this past fall, the biggest in its history. The goals listed on the campaign’s website seem opaque. The Air and Space Museum will be renovated. There’s lots of endowment-building. The campaign’s gone public, so probably half the money is pledged. What else, precisely, is the campaign funding? Congress, the Interior Department, and the White House ought to ask.

I wonder how the National Gallery, the jewel in the crown, should figure in a recalibration of federal museum programming. Its board chairman, Darren Walker, led the Ford Foundation for ten years before he retired last year. He’d already been appointed as a National Gallery trustee, which I thought was a bad idea. He had, I thought, too many competing agendas and, under his direction, the Ford Foundation went turbo-high-octane woke. Now, he’s in charge. He’s the wrong man for the times. Last week, I wrote about Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, a new National Gallery survey of a good — tier three — artist that’s strong on biography. Would it cross the Trump EO line? I suppose it would. She was big into Che and Fidel, both mass murderers.

The Trump EO also mandates the restoration of federal monuments — mostly, I think, Confederate — removed since the riots in 2020. Goodness, can’t this be a local issue decided by people who have to look at them? I’d suggest — I’m always chockablock with advice — the fast restoration of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, a lovely, moving sculpture from 1914 felled last year by morons educated beyond their intelligence and authorized by President Dementia via Autopen. As art goes, most war memorials are tier five — insipid and derivative and, if public art, pigeon stoops — but this one is nice.

Before the Defense Department gnomes send it to the smelter, let’s bring it back. I’m descended from Union and Confederate dead. I wouldn’t place any explanatory panel near it. It’s a cemetery monument. If viewers want to learn more, they can crack open a book or two.