Critics Say Trump’s Attack on Black Smithsonian Whitewashes U.S. History
Donald Trump’s latest executive order—titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”—is facing fierce backlash from historians, civil rights advocates, and Black political leaders who see it as a direct attempt to sanitize the nation’s racial history and undermine institutions that reflect it.
The order calls out the National Museum of African American History and Culture by name, claiming the Smithsonian is part of a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.”
It directs Vice President JD Vance to review all Smithsonian content to root out anything that “degrades shared American values” or “divides Americans based on race or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.”
The president also wants to ensure that the women’s history museum celebrates women and does not “recognize men as women in any respect.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has also been tasked with identifying monuments removed since 2020 that may “minimize” key historical figures or “perpetuate a false reconstruction” of U.S. history.
However, many view this as an assault on truth.
“It seems like we’re headed in the direction where there’s even an attempt to deny that the institution of slavery even existed,” Clarissa Myrick-Harris, a historian at Morehouse College, told the Associated Press. She added that racial violence, segregation, and Jim Crow were all in danger of being scrubbed from the national narrative.
The outlet noted that many critics argued that Trump’s framing of American history—focused solely on liberty and individual rights while simultaneously ignoring that the same Founding Fathers who wrote “all men are created equal” also enshrined slavery into the Constitution, counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person.
Critics are calling out Trump, including Rep. Yvette Clarke, Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, who said plainly, “We do not run from or erase our history simply because we don’t like it. We embrace the history of our country – the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
Notably, Trump once praised the very institution he now targets. In 2017, after visiting the museum with Sen. Tim Scott and then-HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Trump said, “I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage.”
