Trump targets ‘improper ideology’ at the Smithsonian in latest effort to reshape the arts and history

By Michael Williams, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump is extending his efforts to influence American cultural and artistic institutions to the Smithsonian Institution – a sprawling organization that encompasses the National Zoo and a collection of museums that anchor tourism in the nation’s capital.

In an executive order signed Thursday night, Trump put Vice President JD Vance in charge of stopping government spending on “exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.” Vance serves on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents.

“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” the order reads. “This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum complex, including 21 museums and the National Zoo. Nearly 17 million people visited Smithsonian properties last year, according to the museum’s website. Admission at nearly all the museums is free.

CNN has reached out to the Smithsonian Institution for comment.

The order appears crafted in part to direct the museums to soften or distort forthright discussions about the history and impact of racism in the United States and follows similar orders that seek to exert the president’s will over law firms and educational institutions.

It also follows his aggressive push to take over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, where last month he gutted the board of trustees and was then elected chairman of a newly constituted board.

Trump promised to make the center “great” and eliminate programs he doesn’t support, including drag shows.

Earlier this month, the president also signed an order directing the Institution of Museum and Library Services, among several other government entities, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The IMLS supports museums and libraries in all 50 states.

Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas spoke out against the order on Thursday, saying in an X post, “First Trump removes any reference of diversity from the present — now he’s trying to remove it from our history. Let me be PERFECTLY clear— you cannot erase our past and you cannot stop us from fulfilling our future.”

In his order, Trump specifically targeted the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian American Art Museum as carrying exhibits and promoting language he deemed inappropriate.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture, the order said, “has proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture.’”

That portion of the order appears to refer to an educational resource for discussing race released by the museum in 2020, which the museum almost immediately removed and apologized for.

Trump visited the museum during his first term in 2017, just months after it opened to the public, where he vowed to unite a “divided country” and pledged to do “everything I can to continue that promise of freedom for African Americans and for every American.”

It’s unclear how the order may affect the museum’s sprawling exhibits which includes frank discussion about the history of slavery in the Americas.

The order also criticizes a sculpture exhibit of the Smithsonian American Art Museum examining “the ways in which sculpture has shaped and reflected attitudes and understandings about race in the United States” and a planned exhibit at the forthcoming American Women’s History Museum which the order said celebrated the contributions of transgender athletes.

The order further directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to “provide sufficient funding” to revitalize Independence Hall National Historic Park in Philadelphia, which briefly served as the seat of the federal government and is where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were debated, in preparation for the 250th anniversary of the declaration’s adoption next July 4.

It also directs Burgum to determine whether any statues or memorials in the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history” since Jan. 1, 2020.

Though that time period includes the last year of Trump’s first term, it also encompasses the period where several monuments celebrating Confederate officers, conquistadors and colonialists were removed throughout the United States as part of the racial reckoning and public outcry against George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020.

Burgum is also directed to ensure memorials “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times),” an edict that could be interpreted to direct the removal of references to slave-owning among America’s earliest Founding Fathers.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.