Ever since President Trump started playing armchair museum curator last year, the White House has employed a number of strategies to try to influence exhibitions at the Smithsonian. It has sent threatening letters, published a memo that reads like an exhibit hit list, and even resorted to an occasional bit of online trolling.
The Smithsonian has certainly undergone a small number of changes as a result of the pressure, but compared with, say, the Kennedy Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, it has shown that it is not so easily breached. Yesterday, however, House Republicans appeared poised to push forward a different strategy on behalf of the president: bake Trump’s influence into a Smithsonian museum before it’s even built.
Their target, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Act, was originally simple. It permitted the transfer of land on the National Mall to the Smithsonian for construction, and it had more than 200 bipartisan co-sponsors. But in March, GOP lawmakers added an amendment giving Trump final authority over the museum’s location and prohibiting the institution from including transgender women.
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At a hearing this week, Representative Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, a Republican, said that the changes had been made with the “technical assistance” of the White House. Democrats noted the irony of a man—the president of the United States—potentially having so much control over a place dedicated to telling women’s stories. (The White House did not respond to a request for further details on its involvement.)
When the amended bill went up for a vote in the House yesterday, it flopped. Six Republicans opposed the legislation alongside 210 Democrats. Those six Republicans, all men, seemed to object to the idea of the women’s-history museum in general; three of the four who had been in office in 2020 had voted against the original bill that intended to establish it.
Now the Women’s History Museum is caught in legislative purgatory, brought about by a party that isn’t sure if it wants to control the institution or eradicate it.
It’s a notable shift. In an era of political polarization, the museum had until recently seemed to be the rare cause that almost everyone could rally around. The bill’s circuitous path reflects how nothing—even a museum dedicated to celebrating more than half of the nation’s population—is safe from the institutional interference that began last year when Trump took over the Kennedy Center and threatened the Smithsonian. The museum doesn’t even have a site, but the fight for its soul is on.
In 2014, when Mitch McConnell tapped the longtime Republican activist Jane Abraham for a commission studying the need for a national women’s-history museum, the Republicans and Democrats in the group wondered whether they’d be able to get past their partisan differences.
As the members introduced themselves, it became clear that much more united them than divided them. “So we simply kicked politics to the side, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work,” Abraham said in a February House hearing. They were opinionated and outspoken, sure, but they found consensus. They’d go on to unanimously recommend in 2016 that Congress create a Smithsonian women’s-history museum.
In 2020, Trump signed legislation establishing the institution; he even praised the project last year, calling for a “big and beautiful” museum. The museum’s advisory council is ideologically diverse, with the likes of the actor Rosario Dawson and the repeat GOP political appointee Barbara Barrett, the former U.S. secretary of the Air Force. A congressional staffer told me that in recent years, when she’s been asked about bipartisan issues she works on, the museum, for a long time, was essentially the only thing left to reference.
The Smithsonian is a public-private institution, with about 62 percent of its funding coming from the federal government. As museums go, the institution is generally known for its measured—and, at times, dry—approach.
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Still, a number of moves during Trump’s second term set the new museum up for scrutiny. One of the first executive orders the president signed in January 2025 asserted that the U.S. government would recognize only two genders, according to what it called the “biological reality of sex.” Then the president began to attack the Smithsonian directly, criticizing its “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” and writing that it focused too much on “how bad slavery was.”
The administration created a list of Smithsonian materials it found offensive, including a display at the American History Museum that mentioned transgender athletes, a portrait of Anthony Fauci, and a painting of migrants crossing the southern border. More recently, the Trump administration has threatened to revoke the Smithsonian’s funding if it does not comply with demands to hand over materials for a sweeping content review.
Smithsonian programming and exhibitions are directed by the institution’s staff, who have operated largely without direct interference from the White House—though that has not stopped the Trump administration from trying to take control.
Internally, the Women’s History Museum has been somewhat adrift. The first founding director, Nancy Yao, left in 2023 amid conflict over how she’d handled sexual-assault allegations at a previous job. Elizabeth Babcock, who was appointed in 2024 as another founding director, departed quietly last year to lead Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. Months later, the Women’s History Museum still has only an interim director.
One person involved in the museum’s development told me that Congress’s discussion of what would go in the museum is premature, given that it doesn’t even have a location yet; this person also said that the debate over including trans women undermines the entire project. “Republicans are so invested in eliminating discussion of trans people from a museum like this that they’re willing to have there be no museum at all,” the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the project.
The attempted politicization of this particular museum, apparently with the White House’s blessing, seems to contradict legislation that the president himself signed: A 2020 appropriations bill promised to establish a women’s museum that ensures, “to the extent practicable, an equal representation of the diversity of the political viewpoints held by women of the United States.”
The Women’s Museum joins another major project in limbo—the National Museum of the American Latino, which has a similar land-transfer bill that has not moved forward in Congress. The Smithsonian recommended locations on the Mall for both museums in 2022: one southeast of the Washington Monument, mirroring the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the other near the Tidal Basin, across from the Holocaust Memorial Museum. For now, at least, those coveted National Mall sites will remain empty.
The post How Trump’s Culture War Derailed a New Smithsonian Museum appeared first on The Atlantic.
