A White House official helping lead the Trump administration’s sweeping audit of the Smithsonian accused the institution’s Washington museums of putting too much focus on slavery.
“The fact that our country was involved in slavery is awful. No one thinks otherwise,” Lindsey Halligan, special assistant to the president, told Fox News on Wednesday. “But what I saw when I was going through the museum was an overemphasis on slavery. I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we have come since slavery.”
Halligan added that her mission was to restore the Smithsonian’s place as a “trust instrument” and source of non-biased, high-quality information, rather than “push ideological narratives.”
Earlier this week, the president said his Smithsonian campaign, which began last week, was part of a concerted campaign to eliminate “woke” ideology, just as he had from U.S. universities, a push the administration had previously largely described as an attempt to stop campus antisemitism.
“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of “WOKE,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
Critics said the administration’s campaign against the Smithsonian was ignoring U.S. history, rather than restoring it to U.S. museums.
“It’s the epitome of dumbness to criticize the Smithsonian for dealing with the reality of slavery in America,” Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, told The New York Times. “It’s what led to our Civil War and is a defining aspect of our national history. And the Smithsonian deals in a robust way with what slavery was, but it also deals with human rights and civil rights in equal abundance.”
The White House has said it intends to reframe the history on display at Smithsonian museums to emphasize a more positive story ahead of celebrations for the country’s 250th anniversary next year.
“This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” a letter to Smithsonian officials last week, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, states.
In a fact-sheet highlighting some of the Smithsonian’s ostensible sources of bias, the administration took issue with a display mentioning enslaved people contributing labor to support Benjamin Franklin, as well as a display noting the role of white settlers fighting to protect slavery during the 19th-century Texas Revolution against Mexico.
The Texas Historical Association considers slavery, which formed a key part of the then-frontier territory’s early economy, “an underlying cause of the struggle” with Mexico, which was pushing to abolish slavery at the time.
The fact-sheet also mentions a variety of other examples with seemingly little to do with issues of historical accuracy, criticizing the American History Museum for a section on LGBT+ history and taking the National Portrait Gallery to task for commissioning an animation of Anthony Fauci, a top medical official (and frequent object of Trump criticism) for nearly four decades who advised multiple U.S. presidents.
During his first term, President Trump praised the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, calling it a “beautiful tribute to so many American heroes,” including abolitionists who fought to end slavery.
Despite its push to emphasize positive national stories, the administration has angered critics by restoring the names of military bases originally named for Confederate leaders, who led a secessionist army against the United States government to defend slavery.
