How the Smithsonian became the latest front in Trump's culture war

The piece explains how the Smithsonian Institution has become a central target in a renewed culture war, detailing a concerted campaign by the Trump administration to portray the National Museum of American History as ideologically captured. It cites a 162-page White House report and executive orders beginning in March 2025, congressional hearings that pressed museum director Anthea Hartig about exhibit items (including a 2021 “Electric Dr. Franklin” display that speculated enslaved people may have been used in experiments and a “chrome and rubber crotch harness”), and an order to the Interior Department to erect warning signs outside the museum. Republicans on the Smithsonian’s board and in Congress have threatened deep cuts to federal support - 62 percent of the institution’s funding, more than $1 billion a year - and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum warned other agencies about continuing support. Secretary Lonnie Bunch resigned in September 2025, citing stress.

The report argues the museum’s vulnerability stems not only from recent politics but from long-running institutional tensions over mission and narrative. Since its 1964 origins as a mixed technology-and-history museum, critics have faulted it for lacking a coherent chronological centerpiece; a 2002 blue-ribbon commission urged a transformative re-anchoring but faced curatorial resistance to a “great-man” approach. The Smithsonian’s post-2020 political awakening and debates among board members primed it for attack, leaving the question of how America’s story should be told suddenly very much contested.