The White House Released a Report About the Smithsonian on the Fourth of July. It Tells You Everything About What This Administration Wants America to Forget.
The report, titled “Saving America’s Story,” was published on July 4th by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council. One hundred and sixty-two pages. Released on the 250th birthday of a republic whose history the report claims to be saving. The people who wrote it chose that date deliberately, because symbolism is what this administration does when it cannot make an argument.
The argument they cannot make is this: the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History is a corrupt institution that needs to be purged. The Organization of American Historians — the largest professional organization dedicated to the teaching, writing, and preservation of the history of the United States — rejects the claims made in the report and its demands regarding the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Let us start with what the Smithsonian actually is, because the report relies on most readers not knowing.
Established by Congress in 1846 as a unique and independent agency, the Smithsonian Institution is not, and has never been, under the authority of the Executive Branch. It is an independent statutory agency, led by the Secretary and governed by a bipartisan Board of Regents as established by law. That structure exists precisely so that interpretation across the Smithsonian’s museums is not subject to the whims of whoever occupies the Oval Office.
Despite the Smithsonian’s independent status, a Trump executive order in March 2025 called on Vice President JD Vance to overhaul the Smithsonian with the help of Congress, to make its story more positive. The president ordered the vice president to make history more positive. This is the instruction. Not more accurate. Not more complete. More positive. The National Museum of American History should tell America’s story in a way that makes Americans feel good about it.
History is not a mood ring. It is a record.
What the Report Complains About
The report says the museum now portrays America as defined by white supremacy, slavery, and systemic oppression while downplaying the positive aspects of the nation’s founding and achievements.
Perhaps the most shocking revelation, according to the report, is what visitors will not find. There are no major exhibits dedicated to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Continental Congress, the American Revolution, the Christian history that produced the U.S. Constitution, or the core principles of ordered liberty.
Let us pause here, because this claim is extraordinary. The National Museum of American History, which occupies an entire building on the National Mall and contains more than 1.8 million artifacts spanning four centuries of American life, allegedly contains no exhibits about the American Revolution or the Founding Fathers. This claim was made in a 162-page report without apparently anyone checking whether it was true.
The White House report makes clear its unhappiness: “As it stands today, it would benefit most Americans, especially parents bringing their children for a tour, if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.'”
People who don’t want you to love your country. That is the White House’s description of the curators, historians, archivists, and scholars who maintain the collection of the National Museum of American History. The professionals who have spent their careers preserving the physical objects that tell the story of American life — the gowns of First Ladies, the original Star-Spangled Banner, Archie Bunker’s chair, Julia Child’s kitchen, the lunch counter from the Greensboro sit-in — don’t want you to love your country. That is the official position of the White House Domestic Policy Council.
What the Report Actually Wants
The report insists that history itself is essentially, for Americans, a special and providential story of triumph. Make no mistake: the report represents an attempt to turn back the clock to a time when U.S. history was taught as the history of white Christian men who conquered a continent, U.S. military leaders who rarely lost a battle, and U.S. presidents who were single-handedly responsible for national greatness, all under the cover of “anti-DEI” and “anti-woke” crusading.
If the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History adopts the approaches recommended in the new report, the majority of Americans, including women, workers, people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and more, will not see themselves represented.
The majority of Americans. The report wants a museum that does not represent the majority of Americans. It wants a museum that represents the America its authors want to have existed — an America of uncomplicated triumph, providential destiny, and great men doing great things, in which the people who actually built the country with their labor, suffered under its laws, fought for its expansion, challenged its contradictions, and made it something worth being proud of by forcing it to live up to its own stated ideals — those people are background. Extras. Problems to be footnoted or omitted.
The President Who Tried to Airbrush His Portrait
Trump had sought to fire Kim Sajet, head of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, because he did not like the listing of his impeachments alongside his portrait — or the portrait itself — and really did not like a painting of Lady Liberty as a trans figure.
Trump’s repeated recasting of recent elections as “rigged” and the January 6th, 2021, Capitol riots as “peaceful” are not outliers in the Trump cultural rewrite campaign. A photo of an autopen was placed in the White House hallway of presidents to stand in for Joe Biden. The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool grew algae — and the explanation offered was vandal knife attacks.
This is the man who is releasing a 162-page report about historical accuracy at the Smithsonian. The man who placed a photo of an autopen in his presidential gallery and tried to fire the museum director who refused to remove the record of his impeachments is now the arbiter of honest history.
What History Actually Requires
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has a mandate to present the full American experience with all its triumphs and struggles. This work is the foundation of the discipline and practice of history itself, which has always advanced through evidence, dialogue, debate, and discovery, rather than forced political narratives mandated by presidential decree.
The strength of American democracy has always depended on the public’s ability to encounter a complete and honest account of its past, told by those trained to do that work with rigor and integrity.
The question this report forces us to confront is simple: who has the authority to determine how American history is told?
The answer the administration wants is: the president. The president decides which history is told. The president decides which facts are presented. The president decides which Americans get to see themselves in the national museum. The president decides whether the Greensboro lunch counter belongs in the building or whether it represents the wrong kind of American story.
Trump won an election, and the “spoils” apparently include how to tell America’s story better than historians, museum curators, or anyone not part of the Trump inner circle.
That is not saving America’s story. That is replacing it.
The Smithsonian has the Star-Spangled Banner — the actual flag, the original one, the one that flew over Fort McHenry in 1814 and inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that became the national anthem. It has it. Preserved. Displayed. Available to anyone who walks through the door.
The flag survived the battle of Baltimore. It survived 212 years of American history. It survived the administrations that used it and the ones that ignored it and the ones that abused what it represented.
It will survive a 162-page report written by people who thought July 4th was the right day to tell the museum that preserves it that it hates America.
The flag doesn’t hate America. Neither does the Smithsonian. Neither do the historians. The people who hate American history are the ones who want to rewrite it.