Trump’s cultural clean-up turns America’s attic into a showroom for approved myths
It takes a truly rancid instinct for power to look at the Smithsonian — a sprawling archive of the American experience, with its inconvenient truths and unvarnished triumphs — and decide it needs to be made “safe” for the 250th anniversary of the Republic. But Donald Trump has never met an independent institution he didn’t want to stuff, mount, and display as a trophy in his personal hall of obedience.
The White House letter — co-signed by a cast of loyal apparatchiks whose combined intellectual wattage could barely power a desk lamp — demands a “comprehensive internal review” of eight Smithsonian museums. The goal: “align” them with the President’s vision of “American exceptionalism” and purge “divisive” narratives. In totalitarian terms, this is called a “rectification campaign.” In plain English: rewrite history until it flatters the Leader.
We have precedent, and it is not pretty. The Nazis had Goebbels. The Soviets had Glavlit, the censorship bureau that could erase a man from a photograph as neatly as a stain from a shirt. The trick was never to ban everything — only to replace fact with a curated fiction that rendered disagreement irrelevant. When Stalin’s historians re-authored the Revolution, Trotsky became a ghost. When Trump’s curators get through, slavery will be “involuntary relocation” and the Trail of Tears a “difficult but necessary journey.”
Already, one Smithsonian museum has obligingly stripped mentions of Trump’s impeachments from an exhibit. This isn’t “compliance” — it’s the reflexive bow of the courtier, the eager servility of those who prefer to avoid the trouble truth brings. The Soviets called this “self-criticism,” the habit of punishing oneself before the state has to bother.
And all this in the name of “unity.” Unity, in the Trump lexicon, means the obliteration of any account of America that doesn’t fit the gilded narrative. It is the same principle that drove the Soviet obsession with “socialist realism” and the Nazi doctrine of “heroic realism” — that art and history should only present the people as the Leader would like them to be seen. In such a scheme, the museum’s job is not to display the truth, but to sell the myth.
There is a certain irony — though irony dies quickly in such company — in celebrating the nation’s founding by dismantling the freedom of inquiry it depended on. The United States was built, in part, by men who understood that the record must be preserved in all its contradiction and unpleasantness. To see their intellectual descendants barter away that principle for an invitation to the White House Christmas party is as squalid as it is predictable.
The Smithsonian’s regents swear they will resist partisan interference. They must. For once the wall labels are rewritten, the photos retouched, and the archives “corrected,” the transformation will be irreversible. You cannot exhume a history once it’s been buried by the state; you can only guess at what it was.
The lesson from Berlin and Moscow is simple: when the government edits your past, it is your future they are after. The museums will survive in name, their marble still grand, their halls still echoing — but the truth inside will have been smothered, embalmed, and posed under glass, smiling obediently for the Leader’s pleasure.
