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The Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex with 21 museums, libraries, and even a zoo, is betraying its principal stakeholder: the public.
The people elected President Donald Trump to be the chief executive of the country. His administration has repeatedly asked Secretary Lonnie Bunch III, the Smithsonian’s leader, to furnish a number of materials in order to execute an audit to ensure the Smithsonian is not pushing a woke agenda, thereby degrading America’s national identity, and to guarantee that the Smithsonian will play its part in this year’s celebration of the semiquincentennial of America’s founding.
So far, Bunch has given Trump bupkis, if not the middle finger.
The responses are always evasive: You’re asking for too much, we cannot meet the deadline, the Smithsonian will conduct its own audit — all of which essentially say, “we’re in charge and not the executive branch.” Thus far, very little has been handed over to the administration.
There are many aspects to this question. One, of course, is who runs the Smithsonian. That question can be easily dispatched.
The public forks over $1 billion to the Smithsonian every year, comprising almost two-thirds of its revenues. The institution labels nine of its 21 museums as “national,” and it continues to say that it is devoted to “shaping the future by preserving heritage.”
Not without reason do several members of Congress sit on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, Bunch’s governing authority, which is presided over by the Supreme Court chief justice and the vice president.
It is fatuous, then, to believe that this institution should escape public scrutiny. New York’s Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art are private museums that can do whatever they want. Not so the Smithsonian. The board runs the Smithsonian, and it is susceptible to political pressure, which is to say, what the people want.
Which takes us to the real heart of the problem here: whether art should be responsive to politics. Defenders of Bunch on the Left say no, Trump and other politicians should keep their grubby and philistine fingers off museums.
“Culture wars: Trump’s takeover of arts is straight from the dictator playbook,” ran a headline in the Guardian, a British publication, a year ago. The Authors Guild also fretted. “The Trump administration is undoing 250 years of freedom of expression in the arts and humanities, freedom from government using the arts for propaganda,” it said.
That is also fatuous on multiple levels. Art has always been political, as leftists intent on regime change, from philosopher Antonio Gramsci to former President Barack Obama, have always understood.
Just tour the great museums of Europe, and you will see magnificent renderings of monarchs by court painters who were masters — whether Titian for the Spanish Habsburgs, van Dyke for the Stuarts in England, or Charles Le Brun for French King Louis XIV.
The revolutionaries who toppled kings and sought to change everything also had their court painters. Robespierre, Napoleon, and later revolutionaries had their David and Delacroix, whose renderings can be seen at the Louvre. Che Guevara had his Korda, the result of which can be seen on dirty T-shirts worn by Brooklyn Bolsheviks.
The Left’s pretensions of artistic purity are thereby entirely hypocritical. That argument conveniently conceals the fact that it is the Left that politicized art, as it politicizes all aspects of the culture.
The Smithsonian Institution was just one important battlement to seize in the Long March Through the Institutions, the strategy by cultural Marxists to seize the heights of the culture since the end of the 1960s.
This capture by the Left of the museums, the schools, the universities, the centers for the performing arts, the publishing houses, the media, the libraries, and even the sports leagues — Bad Bunny’s vulgar Super Bowl halftime show being but one example — was rapid, but very, very recent.
That museums needed to be “decolonized” — that is, turned anti-American and anti-West — is an idea that seems to go back to, oh, 2012, when Amy Lonetree, a scholar from the Winnebago Tribe of the Upper Midwest, published Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. These ideas gained traction among a certain set of museum workers.
One of them is Bunch himself, the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened its doors in 2016, and the head of the entire Smithsonian since May 2019.
As head of both institutions, Bunch has embraced movements that seek to topple America’s status quo no less than Robespierre and Napoleon upturned all of Europe, notably the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter.
Again, this leftist assault on public culture and heritage was as rapid as it was sweeping, but it’s important to remember that it began very recently. It really accelerated after BLM’s riots in 2020. Conservatives, and Trump, believe that this terrain is thus primed for reconquest. This is not like reversing the New Deal. Moreover, much depends on regaining this territory that was just lost. Indeed, the continuity of the American experiment hangs on retaking this ground.
We’re coming up on a year since the administration posted its first action ordering the Smithsonian to stop tarnishing U.S. history and the people’s experience, an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to History, signed by Trump on March 27, 2025. And still the Smithsonian and Bunch refuse to budge.
The executive order was clear: “Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
The executive order required Vice President JD Vance; the assistant to the president for domestic policy, Vince Haley; and the then-special assistant to the president and senior associate staff secretary, Lindsey Halligan, to undertake to “remove improper ideology from such properties, and shall recommend to the President any additional actions necessary to fully effectuate such policies.”
Bunch’s response to the executive order came in a letter to staff days later, reaffirming his belief that the Smithsonian is independent and it has control over content, programming, and the educational material that play such a prominent role in K-12 schools.
The institution, Bunch added, was accountable to the public, but not through the executive branch.
“We will continue to employ our internal review processes, which keep us accountable to the public,” Bunch wrote. “When we err, we adjust, pivot, and learn as needed. As always, our work will be shaped by the best scholarship, free of partisanship, to help the American public better understand our nation’s history, challenges, and triumphs.”
The Smithsonian, he added, would “remain committed to telling the multifaceted stories of this country’s extraordinary heritage.” Translation: The approach would continue to be diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The next round in the protracted skirmish came in an Aug. 12, 2025, letter to Bunch by Haley; Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget; and Halligan, which upped the ante.
The administration, the letter reads, would be helping to implement the executive order by conducting a “comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions” 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.”
The authors asked the Smithsonian to send the White House plans on how it planned to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s birth; digital files and wall didactics for all current exhibitions; an index of traveling and upcoming exhibitions; curatorial and staff manuals used in internal governance; an index of permanent collections; educational materials, including teacher guides; description of official museum websites; a list of external partners; copies of grant applications; and responses to surveys and evaluations of visitors experience.
Only the following eight museums would be included in this initial audit: the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
“As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Nation’s founding, it is more important than ever that our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story,” the letter reads.
The museums were given 75 days to furnish the material, and within 120 days, “museums should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions.”
And, once again, the response of the Smithsonian was nearly crickets.
This takes us to December 2025, less than two months ago, when Haley and Vought reminded Bunch in a letter that while he had sent over some material, “that submission fell far short of what was requested, and the overwhelming majority of requested items remain outstanding.” Yet another deadline came and went a month ago on Friday, and Bunch, again, has yielded very little.
This is a standoff you may not hear much about, but much depends on its outcome.
