Donald Trump has threatened to cut off funding to the prestigious Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC if its displays are influenced by “divisive, race-centred ideology”.
At-risk pieces include an exhibition which suggests race is a “social construct” and a directive to a national park to “dismantle” its “Western foundations” and “interrogate institutional racism”.
Signage that refers to Confederate military leaders at dozens of civil war battlefields, which was ripped out under the Biden administration in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, could also be reinstated under a presidential executive order.
In his order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, Mr Trump rounded on the prestigious Smithsonian, claiming it had “promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”.
The order adds: “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.”
A raft of exhibitions have been cited in the president’s planned purge, including a sculpture show which described race as a “social construct” rather than a biological reality. According to the publicity for the show, “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism”.
The sculpture DNA Study Revisited by artist Roberto Lugo, part of the exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture – Mark Schiefelbein/Copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved
Attention may also be turned to a graphic on the website for The National Museum of African American History and Culture, which argued that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” were aspects of “White culture”.
He also rounded on the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum demanding that it should remove any reference to transgender women and “not recognise men as women in any respect in the museum”.
In 2019, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum held a show celebrating “LGBTQ+ women who made history”, honouring among others, 1920s vaudeville star Josephine Baker who fled to Paris and later found fame as a spy working for the Allies in the Second World War.
Symone Sanders Townsend, who acted as communications chief for Kamala Harris in the White House, said an invitation she received to host an event at one of the Smithsonian museums had been withdrawn in the wake of the order.
“I got a call from the museum uninviting me to host because they “got cold feet” and frankly were concerned about their funding. By Thursday, the president put a target on the back of the whole Smithsonian Institution,” she wrote.
Symone Sanders Townsend says an invitation she had received to host an event at one of the Smithsonian museums has been withdrawn – NBC
Mr Trump’s plans to exert control over the museum will be spearheaded by JD Vance, the vice-president, who is a member of the Smithsonian’s governing Board of Regents.
The White House Office of Management and Budget will stop spending on exhibits or programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law”.
Other institutions caught up in the latest chapter of the culture war include the National Zoo, which forms part of the Smithsonian and the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.
There, Mr Trump claimed, the Biden administration had introduced training for rangers which advocated dismantling “Western foundations” and “interrogating institutional racism”.
The order also calls for the Department of the Interior, which oversees civil war battlefields, to reinstate monuments and signs which were changed under the Biden administration to “inappropriately minimise the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology”.
Toppling of statues
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests signs were re-written and several military bases, previously named after Confederate generals, were relabelled.
Across the country, Confederate statues were toppled, either by protesters or municipal authorities.
A handful on federal land, like the Confederate Reconciliation Monument at Arlington National Cemetery, are likely to be reinstated.
The backlash has extended to South Carolina, which has drawn up laws to protect Confederate statues – including outlawing installing plaques which give them a “more modern” context.
In Florida, groups have launched a campaign to restore Confederate statues such as that of Robert E Lee in Fort Myers.
Jonathan Butcher of the conservative Heritage Foundation claimed the “rewriting of history” had extended to historical monuments which were not under Smithsonian control.
This was true at the homes of George Washington and James Madison, the first and fourth American presidents, where considerable emphasis was placed on them as slave owners, he told The Telegraph.
The charities which run them had been “swept up in the same kind of, self-loathing, that has turned the focus from America’s past and America’s history to this focus on racial division and on slavery,” he said.