Trump’s Cultural Revolution Is Just Getting Started
Credit: Jared Soares for The New York Times
by David Firestone
August 11, 2025
New York Times
[Mr. Firestone is a former member of the editorial board of The New York Times and was the executive editor for digital at NBC News.]
This article has been updated to reflect news developments.
Label by label, on paintings, monuments and historical treasures, the Trump administration is trying to impose a new portrait of America that is without flaw and without internal debate. It’s happening at the Liberty Bell and the giant redwoods of Muir Woods, and especially in the halls of the Smithsonian Institution, the nation’s semiofficial collection of museums, which is allowing Trumpian history to supersede the accuracy of scholarship.
Last month a label that mentioned that President Trump had been impeached twice disappeared from an exhibit on the presidency at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton are still included, but an important part of modern political history was neatly redacted from the version millions of visitors to Washington would see. After an outcry, the museum said on Friday that it had restored the label (minus a few details about the role Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech played in the ensuing riot at the Capitol) and it insisted that the Trump administration never asked for its removal.
The White House has already established a pattern of trying to intimidate the Smithsonian and other institutions into altering their cultural content to match its ideology. The Trump administration, in fact, has made an aggressive effort to rewrite not only its own history but also that of the United States, especially as it is documented in its official museums and cultural artifacts. In this new narrative, there can be no arguments about oppression by race or gender or ethnicity or sexuality or economic class, the administration implies, because no such oppression will be acknowledged in the official history, which can only be uplifting. For Mr. Trump, denying entire chapters of American history is as easy as denying last month’s jobs numbers, and it is no less dangerous to the nation’s understanding of itself.
Frustrated that he cannot control it directly, Mr. Trump has become fixated on the Smithsonian, knowing that it plays an outsize role as the nation’s government-funded storyteller. In March he signed an executive order accusing the institution of coming under the influence of a “divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrays American values as harmful and oppressive. The order specifically criticized an exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that included an unimpeachable statement that race has been used “to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege and disenfranchisement.” In June he managed to pressure Kim Sajet, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, into stepping down after criticizing her support for racial and gender equality.
The Smithsonian said the references to the Trump impeachments had been removed as part of a review of the institution’s content for bias, and The Washington Post reported this review began after Mr. Trump claimed he fired Ms. Sajet. It’s not clear yet how widespread this review will be, but already one prominent artist has refused to exhibit her works at the Portrait Gallery after it balked at showing one of her paintings. Amy Sherald, who painted the widely popular official portrait of Michelle Obama in 2018, said last month she was withdrawing her solo show from the Portrait Gallery because the museum was considering excluding her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty to avoid offending Mr. Trump.
Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president whose portfolio includes the Smithsonian, accused the artist of trying “to reinterpret one of our nation’s most sacred symbols through a divisive and ideological lens.” (Did we really need another sign that the administration never understood the true message of the Statue of Liberty?)
And the White House is just getting started. It has begun to regularly savage any exhibit that it considers too woke or too critical of American culture, as it did last month to an exhibit on popular entertainment at the National Museum of American History that dared to add historical context to familiar objects. A display about Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz” mentioned the Great Depression and the coming world war; a label on two “Star Wars” droids noted the nation needed “new hope” after the Vietnam War and Watergate; another on Mickey Mouse noted his original blackface appearance. That was all apparently triggering for the White House. As Ms. Halligan told Fox News: “Framing American culture as inherently violent, imperialist or racist does not reflect the greatness of our nation or the millions of Americans who have contributed to its progress.”
Mr. Trump also ordered the Interior Department to remove any descriptions from national monuments or parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” Already, dutiful Park Service employees have flagged signs at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia depicting the abuse of fugitive slaves. The Park Service is restoring a statue of a Confederate general in Washington that was torn down and burned during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. And unsurprisingly, the administration removed references to transgender people from the Park Service’s website for the Stonewall National Monument in Greenwich Village. It feels like only a matter of time until the government’s Wite-Out is applied nationwide.
For the president and the right-wing culture warriors who are pushing these revisions, the real offense of these museums is that they finally tell the truth about American history — who benefited and who suffered — in an unsparing way.
The Portrait Gallery now has labels on many of its paintings of prominent early Americans that show how many people they enslaved. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture presents a harrowing history of American slavery and the bloody oppression of the Jim Crow era. Much of its collection, in fact, is a rebuke to the notion of American exceptionalism, explaining that the United States became a global economic power by enslaving Africans.
There is simply no way to rewrite or disguise this story. It’s impossible to leave its magnificent building on the National Mall without feeling shamed and haunted. And there is no harm in accepting that shame. More of it might help new generations confront the reality of their past and prevent further injustices.
American shame is precisely what the government is trying to prevent, particularly over racial issues, even if the cost of that erasure is future generations of ignorance. In its desire to remake the Smithsonian into a “symbol of inspiration,” dedicated to “instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans,” the White House is trying to impose a government-mandated whitewashing of art and history. Nothing painful will be depicted, described or taught; no human suffering will be acknowledged; no heroes will be reduced in their grandeur by moral failings. It would no doubt impress the Soviet commissars who imposed socialist realism on generations of artists.
For now, the White House has no direct leverage over private museums. Two in New York are presenting exhibitions that repudiate the Trumpian notion that art must uphold an officially approved narrative. “Blacklisted: An American Story” at the New York Historical is a sharp reminder of the cost to society when the government decides to crack down on a disfavored ideology and winds up undermining the freedom to speak, as it did during the Red Scare beginning in 1947. What’s depressingly familiar about the exhibit is its documentation of how important institutions, including most Hollywood studios and television networks, complied with the demands of the Red baiters and refused to push back, just as the Smithsonian appears to be doing now.
Across Manhattan, the Jewish Museum has mounted a vital exhibition called “Ben Shahn, on Nonconformity,” showing why authoritarians are so often afraid of artists who use their canvases to speak against social and political injustice. Shahn, a Jewish immigrant from what is now Lithuania, who died in 1969, used his paintings and photographs to cry out against government persecution of workers and radicals, supporting unions and programs like Social Security. But some of the most memorable works in the collection are acidic portraits of politicians he despised. One political poster from 1948 shows Gov. Thomas Dewey perched on top of a piano while Harry Truman plays “Little White Lies.” Both are wearing sinister, toothy grins.
By resisting outside pressure, artists like Shahn and Ms. Sherald have demonstrated what resistance to an authoritarian culture looks like. But can only private institutions let artists speak their minds? For most of its existence, the Smithsonian largely presented a polished, authorized version of cultural history; only in recent years did a new generation of historians and curators allow contrasting views to emerge. As Shahn knew, art can only be effective at illuminating and healing if it is unconstrained by authority.
“Nonconformity is the basic precondition of art, as it is the precondition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people,” he wrote, in a book excerpt that is posted at the gateway to the Jewish Museum’s show.
“The degree of nonconformity present — and tolerated — in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Firestone is a former member of the editorial board of The New York Times and was the executive editor for digital at NBC News.
More on Trump, art and history:
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Now the President Is an Art Critic
June 4, 2025
Opinion | John McWhorter
The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn
May 17, 2025
Opinion | David W. Blight
Trump Cannot Win His War on History
March 31, 2025
