The Trump administration’s attack on one of America’s most famous museums has resurrected the ghosts of a “famously racist law,” according to a new analysis.
The Trump administration recently published a 162-page reportthat accuses the Smithsonian of promoting an anti-American sentiment by acknowledging that some of America’s founders owned slaves and that it supported illegal immigration by including the imagery of a butterfly in a PowerPoint presentation. Catherine Rampell, economic editor at The Bulwark, argued in a new article that the administration also included a “telling” defense of a racist law in the report in furtherance of its anti-immigrant agenda.
“But arguably the most telling section of the White House report relates to its defense of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,” Rampell wrote. “The report’s authors bristle at any suggestion that this famously racist law may have been motivated by any kind of racial animus. After all, such an acknowledgment might raise uncomfortable questions about the policies of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller—policies that are explicitly modeled on laws like this one.”
Trump made immigration one of his top issues on the campaign trail in 2024 and has since erected a wide-ranging deportation machine with the help of Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff for policy.
Rampell noted that Miller’s rhetoric about immigration has become “spookily reminiscent of rhetoric around the 1882 law” throughout the second administration. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the brainchild of a society that blamed Chinese people for local economic issues, Rampell noted, similarly to how the Trump administration has blamed illegal immigrants for everything from the degeneration of American culture to the housing affordability crisis.
“So you can imagine why the Trump administration might get a wee bit defensive about anyone offering a critical perspective on this part of our nation’s history, especially since they hope to repeat it,” Rampell noted.
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