When Trump took control of the Smithsonian Institution and its multiple museums yesterday, his executive order pledged to purge the museums of unpatriotic exhibits (WOKE ideology and DEI), the targets of Trump’s rage. Trump gave the job to Vance, who will presumably clean up the nation’s history and make it as inspiring (to white males) as it was before the 1960s.

Remember the halcyon days before the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and other “blemishes” on our national history? Trump does. That’s the story he wants in The Smithsonian: heroes, accomplishments, triumphs! When men were men, and everyone else was in the background.

The Washington Post reported:

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Thursday evening promising to eliminate “divisive narratives” from the Smithsonian Institution’s museums and restore “monuments, memorials, statues, markers” that have been removed over the past five years.

The “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order directs Vice President JD Vance to eliminate what he finds “improper” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo. The White House fact sheet describing the order said it will focus on removing “anti-American ideology.”

The institution, the official keeper of the American story, has operated independently as a public-private partnership created by an act of Congress in 1846. The order is an unprecedented act to edit an institution that has been expanding over many decades to include a wider, richer and more diverse telling of the nation’s history.

“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the executive order says. “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

Trump’s order calls the museum’s evolving approach a reconstruction of history that is “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

Historians were immediately dismayed.
“Attacking the idea that telling the whole story of the United States is an ideological plot to cast the United States in a negative light testifies to a stunningly brittle insecurity about our nation and its past,” said Chandra Manning, a professor of American history at Georgetown University.

“It seems to suggest that if we allow anyone to hear the whole story of challenges that Americans have overcome, our nation will shatter. The American people are not so fragile as all that,” Manning said.

Trump’s executive order demands an “ideological purity test” and “restores neither truth nor sanity,” said Adam Rothman, an American history professor at Georgetown University. “The president’s proclamation disrespects the thousands of sincere and dedicated researchers, curators, scientists, guides, interpreters, docents and countless other people who work hard every day to preserve and tell the nation’s story truthfully, and in ways that educate and inspire the American public.”