La Jornada: White House report calls Smithsonian leaders unreliable radical activists

New York. A White House report characterizes the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution, especially at the National Museum of American History, as radical activists who cannot be trusted, indicating that President Donald Trump may be preparing to install his own team.

The report, released by the White House Domestic Policy Council late on Independence Day, comes amid Trump’s aggressive campaign to reform some of Washington’s most revered cultural and historical institutions. The magnate revealed in March his intention to impose changes at the Smithsonian through an executive order that targeted funding for programs that promoted “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology,” while continuing his attack against a culture he considers too liberal.

According to the council’s report, led by a former Trump senior speechwriter, “the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell the story of the United States honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.

“As this report shows, confirmed in the words of the museum’s leadership, this ideological capture has moved the museum’s mission away from direct historical education and academic work and toward extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country,” the authors added.

The Smithsonian did not respond to requests for comment.

Historian Lonnie Bunch, current secretary of the Smithsonian, is the first African-American to head the institution. In an unrelated interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s Meet the PressBunch stated that “the idea of ​​being a more perfect union, not the perfect union, is really what motivates me.

“I want people to understand that there is a responsibility to continue making those aspirations available, accessible and meaningful to many people,” the academic added. “America’s greatest strength is not to flee from its history, but to understand how that history shaped us and continues to shape us.”

Historian Anthea M. Hartig is the first woman to serve as director of the National Museum of American History.

Trump’s growing effort to force changes at the Smithsonian marks the Republican president’s latest move to transform cultural pillars of society, such as universities and the arts, that he sees as misaligned with conservative sensibilities. Trump had him installed as chairman of the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with the goal of reforming programming, and his elected board voted to add his name to the building, only to later have the signage removed by a federal judge.

The administration also forced Columbia University to make a series of policy changes, threatening it with the loss of several hundred million dollars in federal funding.

Trump has also imposed changes at historic sites outside Washington, including in Philadelphia, where the administration won a court ruling last week allowing it to reinstall interpretive panels that critics say whitewash the history of slavery at the site of President George Washington’s home. Advocates, academics and officials fear that Trump’s version will offer a story that minimizes the pain of the country’s past in favor of a more triumphalist vision.

Rewriting history

Gov. Josh Shapiro, D-Pennsylvania, accused Trump and his allies of trying to “rewrite history.”

“There is no single narrative about our history that a president can impose,” Shapiro, a potential presidential hopeful, said in an interview that aired yesterday on CNN. State of the Union.

“And any president should want to make sure that all that history is shared, that the American people can draw their own conclusions,” Shapiro said.

Trump’s Domestic Policy Council doesn’t necessarily agree.

The National Museum of American History “confronts visitors with materials designed to undermine faith in the institutions and long-held shared ideals of the American people,” the council report noted. “We must commit to restoring truth and sanity to the way history is presented and taught.”

In seeking to carry out Trump’s order, which he called “Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History,” the review concluded by determining that the museum, “by intent and under the direction of the current leadership of the Museum and the Smithsonian, has become subject to institutional capture by a radical and activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble and honest story of the great country we know and love.”