Inside the Battle for The Smithsonian

The look on the curator’s face said it all, and the intensity of the conversation was escalating by the moment. Confusion to worry. Worry to dread.

“I want to do this,” the curator said. “But I don’t think I can do this. I’m worried that I might get in trouble.”

On any other day, the curator’s sit-down with a high-ranking Smithsonian official about an exhibition plan would have been routine—the idea wasn’t particularly controversial. But not on this day in late March. President Donald Trump’s White House had just issued an executive order, a mere 1,100 words or so but plenty enough to shake the world’s largest museum and research institution to its core, a document titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

The order lambasted The Smithsonian, saying it had “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.” It went on to order Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to seek out and “remove improper ideology” and to take a hand in reshaping content at the popular 21-museum complex as well as its research centers and the National Zoo. The Trump administration, the order said, would work to ensure The Smithsonian would transmit an “uplifting” message to remind “Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

The order felt almost Orwellian to some.

“It taps into people’s basest fears,” a high-ranking official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns about retribution, told me.

Across the breadth of the vast Smithsonian network, similar reactions were taking place. Officials were beginning to doubt their decisions. Might they be self-editing to appease a vengeful president? Might self-editing morph into self-sabotage? Might The Smithsonian, which gets a large percentage of its budget from the federal government but prides itself on independence, become a political propaganda tool?

“The whole thing is fucked up,” said artist Mika Rottenberg, whose work will be featured at The Smithsonian in November. “So many things are fucked up.”

Trump’s move also caught some off guard. In the previous months, a sense of relief had taken hold in some corners of The Smithsonian. Trump had fired the head of the National Archives and Records Administration and he’d seized control of the Kennedy Center (he would go on to fire the Librarian of Congress too). But he’d left The Smithsonian, a hugely popular tourist destination that received nearly 17 million visits in 2024, alone.

In the months to follow Trump generated more waves of anxiety with a controversial plan to scrutinize everything from exhibits to curatorial guidelines, scour for material he considers to be “woke” or disparaging of white people, and recast The Smithsonian’s displays and the stories it tells. Insiders are wondering whether the Board of Regents will resist or—as many others have in recent months in the realms of art, law, and academia—bend a knee.

“The whole thing is fucked up,” renowned video artist Mika Rottenberg, whose work is slated to be included in a multi-artist exhibit at The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in November, told me. “So many things are fucked up.”

Richard Long, the celebrated British sculptor and land artist who will be featured in the same exhibit, told me he’s concerned that Trump may be trying “to strangle everything” at The Smithsonian.

“He’s a terrible man,” Long, who said he hasn’t followed developments at The Smithsonian in granular detail, told me. “This is a new ball game. He should keep out of things he doesn’t know anything about.”

Questions about the future of The Smithsonian are all coming to a head this fall. Some of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists are slated for exhibitions at museums the Trump administration is now including in the first phase of its Smithsonian review. In February, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or SAAM, has scheduled a solo show, “Mammoth,” by the Black sculptor and performance artist Nick Cave, with a body of work that would seem almost certain to provoke anti-woke sensibilities. On the website promoting Cave’s show, SAAM notes that his Soundsuits, arguably his best-known works, were created in response to “racialized police violence.” Cave did not respond to an interview request.

For November, The Hirshhorn has lined up an all-star cast to be displayed alongside Rottenberg for its “Big Things for Big Rooms” show: Paul Chan, Olafur Eliasson, Spencer Finch, Rashid Johnson. None of them agreed to interview requests for this story, a common theme in a cautious environment.

Even as Trump was launching evaluation of The Smithsonian—an assessment outlined in a letter sent to its secretary in mid-August demanding a top-to-bottom accounting of collections at eight museums—he was rendering judgment. On Truth Social, he wrote, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been—Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

In August, Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to Trump with no museum experience who has taken a lead role in his takeover of cultural institutions, told Newsmax that she intended to find out “where The Smithsonian went wrong.”

Halligan did not respond to an interview request.

Trump’s intervention at The Smithsonian has dovetailed with his seeming desire to remake America’s arts scene to fit his singular tastes and to place himself at the center of it as a kind of master of ceremonies—who is also master of all. He has made lightning-strike seizures of elements of the nation’s cultural life, including taking over the Kennedy Center, where he has purged board members, replacing them with appointees that then elected him as chairman and naming Richard Grenell interim president. Meanwhile his Republican allies in Congress seek to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Opera House in honor of first lady Melania Trump. Performers such as Rhiannon Giddens, Issa Rae, and Adam Weiner of Low Cut Connie have canceled in protest.

When it came time in August to unveil the Kennedy Center’s annual awards honorees, Trump himself announced the recipients, which included country music star George Strait and the rock band Kiss, and declared that he would host the show, which has historically been splashily broadcast on network television.

“It’s these kinds of interventions across the board—interventions on the part of this branch of the government—that are inconsistent with what I think the United States of America is as a constitutional republic,” Rick West, who was the founding director of The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, told me. “It is simply emblematic and symptomatic of what is happening in all kinds of different quarters of life in the country…that’s dangerous and wrong.”

Trump’s taste in art has tended toward the gilded and the potentially fallacious. Long before turning into a White House interior designer, Trump bragged to Playboy in the mid-1990s about owning a $10 million Renoir that he displayed in his private plane. Reporters and art historians cast doubt, suggesting it was a fake and the real one had been hanging in a Chicago museum for decades.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle did not address questions about the Renoir, but said, “President Trump is a champion of the arts, as evidenced by the interior and exterior of his world-class properties and the ongoing beautification of the White House.”

In his first term, Trump paid only scant attention to The Smithsonian, and when he did, things sometimes got weird.

Lonnie Bunch III, who is secretary of The Smithsonian, recounted in his 2019 memoir an awkward moment while giving Trump a tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade,” Bunch wrote. “As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum. He quickly proved me wrong. As he turned from the display he said to me, ‘You know, they love me in the Netherlands.’ All I could say was ‘let’s continue walking.’”

With The Smithsonian in turmoil, Trump summoned Bunch to lunch at the White House in late August. Neither man immediately said what had been discussed, but a White House official told reporters the get-together was “productive and cordial.”

In his second term, Trump had been in office for less than a month when he took over the Kennedy Center, a move that its leaders claimed they were helpless to counter because of an obscure court ruling years earlier that had set precedent for presidents to remove members of boards and commissions with wide latitude.

The Smithsonian seemed like a logical next target. But its staff, though bracing anxiously for what might be coming, had some reason to feel insulated. Unlike the Kennedy Center, the president does not name members of The Smithsonian’s Board of Regents.

But Trump’s executive order in March altered the mood.

“The White House can’t tell The Smithsonian what to do directly,” said Daniel Lewis, an expert on presidential powers.

The order singled out the Smithsonian American Art Museum, saying its “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” exhibit suggested that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement” and that the exhibit maintained that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism.”

Trump directed Halligan and Vice President Vance, who serves as a nonvoting member of the Board of Regents, to block funding for exhibits that he deemed as not promoting American values.

He had no legal authority to do so, Vanderbilt University political science professor David Lewis, an expert on presidential powers, told me.

“The White House can’t tell The Smithsonian what to do directly,” Lewis says.

Still, in May, Trump provoked another crisis, saying in a social media post that he was firing the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, whom he labeled without evidence as partisan. While she clung to her job, the Board of Regents, which includes a bipartisan cohort of members of Congress and high-powered figures, issued one of those limp, oh so inside-the-Beltway statements asserting that it was in charge of running The Smithsonian and empowering Bunch, the institution’s highest-ranking official.

That became hard to believe when Sajet resigned a couple weeks later, saying she was putting the museum ahead of personal interests.

Trump took credit. A White House spokesman said in a statement, “On day one, President Trump made clear that there is no place for dangerous anti-American ideology in our government and institutions…. With this objective, he ordered the termination of Kim Sajet.”

Trump has an important potential ally besides Vance at The Smithsonian who failed to meaningfully come to Sajet’s defense and who runs the board’s meetings. The chancellor of The Smithsonian is Chief Justice John Roberts, whose Supreme Court has repeatedly facilitated some of Trump’s most audacious power grabs in areas such as immigration and presidential immunity.

Bunch soon announced that the board had directed him to instruct Smithsonian staff to examine their museums and “make any needed changes to ensure unbiased content.”

While The Smithsonian was processing that request, more tumult ensued as Amy Sherald, whose portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama made her a star, canceled an upcoming solo show at the National Portrait Gallery because she said the museum had told her that her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty might be removed to avoid provoking Trump. (The Smithsonian denied doing so, saying in a statement that it only intended to add context to the presentation of the portrait. Sherald did not follow up on an interview request for this story.)

Rottenberg, whose inclusion in the forthcoming Hirshhorn show is beyond her direct control because the work planned for the exhibition is owned by the museum, told me that Sherald’s decision was “amazing.”

“Amy Sherald stood up to them,” Rottenberg said, adding that political influence over museum content is “poison.”

Sherald was in a strong position to take a principled stand, though taking such public positions carries risk for even the biggest names in the arts world. Her notoriety gives her plenty of options elsewhere. Lesser-known artists might have less leverage. The lure of being exhibited at an internationally renowned institution, even if it is compromised by political influence, might be too much to resist for artists still struggling to make names for themselves, an outside contributor to Smithsonian exhibition planning told me on condition of anonymity because of concerns about retribution.

What lies ahead is uncertain. Trump’s order to review content of eight museums is monumental in scope and will be followed by more museums, Halligan has said. Might the pandas at the National Zoo—on loan from China—someday be screened for their compliance with a Trumpian worldview?

For now the museums under the microscope are the National Museum of African American History and Culture, American History (which displays Julia Child’s kitchen), Natural History, and the American Indian, as well as the National Air and Space Museum (home to Evel Knievel’s Harley-Davidson), the American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and The Hirshhorn. Will they comply or push back?

“I want the Board of Regents to stand up,” West, the former museum director who also has a background as an attorney, told me. “It is in their hands…. It’s clear to me—notwithstanding the fact that the administration lacks the legal authority to be doing what they’re doing—that publishing that first statement was not sufficient. They need to hold the territory.”

For an institution that gets more than 60% of its funding from the federal government and had a $1 billion budget request before Congress as Trump was issuing his order, the pressure is enormous. As will be the task. Among the materials Trump’s White House is ordering The Smithsonian to provide are exhibition texts, wall didactics, websites, details about current and future exhibitions, especially those related to planning for next year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and proposed artwork.

The request is so far-reaching that in mid-summer some museum directors were at a loss how to even begin. If the Trump plan were to metastasize to include the entire Smithsonian collection that would mean cataloging and analyzing some 155 million objects.

“They’re horrified, and they should be,” Rick West, the founding director of The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian said about Smithsonian employees. “The anxiety level is bumping up against 10 on a scale of one to 10.”

“What Lonnie Bunch is facing now is kind of a no-win challenge of trying to define the red line beyond which an organization loses its virtue, which is fundamentally its credibility in the public,” Brian LeMay, a former executive at The Smithsonian who is now a museum management consultant, told me.

West, who remains the director emeritus of The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian after having served for more than a decade and a half until 2007, says the Smithsonian staffers he’s talking to are in the midst of an existential crisis.

“They’re horrified, and they should be,” West said. “The anxiety level is bumping up against 10 on a scale of one to 10.”

The unrest at The Smithsonian prompted a former staffer to call to mind that the crypt of James Smithson lies inside the red sandstone Smithsonian Castle headquarters. The crypt that holds the final remains of Smithson, who gave his name and fortune in the early 1800s to found one of America’s most revered institutions, is out of view while The Castle undergoes a yearslong renovation. The staffer wondered whether the institution will be forever altered—for the worse—when the renovation is complete and his crypt is once again open to the public: “He has to be rolling over in his grave.”