Trump Wants to Rewrite History at the Smithsonian. It’ll Be an Uphill Battle

President Donald Trump wasn’t always at loggerheads with the museums that make up the Smithsonian Institute. In February 2017, he arrived at the brand-new National African American Museum of History and Culture for a tour with its director, Lonnie G. Bunch III, and told Bunch he’d been looking forward to it. His wife, Melania, had recently toured the museum with the first lady of Israel, Sara Netanyahu. After the visit, both women decried “the historic plight of slavery, which the Jewish and African American people have known all too well.”

Trump had brought along Senator Tim Scott and Dr. Ben Carson—the latter, a neurosurgeon and former Trump primary opponent who had an exhibit at the museum dedicated to his career—his daughter Ivanka, and the niece of Martin Luther King Jr., Alveda King, who had supported Trump in the 2016 election.

If the remarks after the tour are to be taken at face value, Trump had a pretty great time.

“This museum is a beautiful tribute to so many American heroes—heroes like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, the Greensboro students, and the African American Medal of Honor recipients, among so many other really incredible heroes,” the then-and-future president said.

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And then, singling out the museum’s then director, Trump said, “I am very, very proud of Lonnie Bunch. The work and the love that he has in his heart for what he’s done is—I always talk about, you need enthusiasm, you need really love for anything you do to do it successfully. And, Lonnie, you are where? Come on. Where’s Lonnie? You should be up here, Lonnie. Come on.”

A different anecdote from the day’s tour stood out to Bunch years later. As he recalled in his 2019 memoir, A Fool’s Errand, at one point during the day, the president stood in front of a display that described in detail how the Netherlands contributed to the first 200 years of the transatlantic slave trade. Trump stared at the text on the wall, then turned to Bunch.

“You know, they love me in the Netherlands,” Trump said.

“Let’s continue walking,” Bunch replied.

“I was so disappointed in his response to one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history,” he went on to write in the book (which carried the subtitle “Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump”). “Here was a chance to broaden the views and the understanding of the incoming president and I had been less successful than I had expected.”

While the Netherlands episode didn’t merit much of a response from the White House when the book was released, it’s now at the center of an effort by the administration to infiltrate the heart of the Smithsonian, and rid it of, what it recently called, “This revisionist movement [that] seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

That choice quote comes from “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” an executive order issued by Trump late last month that explicitly asked Vice President JD Vance to remove “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian through his perch on the institution’s Board of Regents, via statute. News coverage of the order anticipated the worst. Dictating the programming of an independent cultural organization would be completely unprecedented, like so much is these days, e.g., the private universities and law firms that have acquiesced to Trump’s demands. Perhaps the leaders of the Smithsonian would as well?

But Bunch, who has served as secretary of the Smithsonian since 2019, was not ready to fold. Days later, he sent a memo to staff saying, “As always, our work will be shaped by the best scholarship, free of partisanship, to help the American public better understand our nation’s history, challenges, and triumphs.”

“Lonnie Bunch is a Democrat donor and rabid partisan who manufactured lies out of thin air in order to boost sales of his miserable book,” Trump’s smashmouth attack dog Steven Cheung told the Times. “Fortunately, he, along with his garbage book, are complete failures.”

That’s a long seven years removed from “very, very proud.”

(A representative for Bunch declined an interview request for this story, citing his schedule.)

It seems like a scary time at the Smithsonian. Last week, the NMAAHC, known colloquially as the Blacksonian, announced that Kevin Young, who succeeded Bunch as director, was stepping down permanently after spending the last few weeks on leave. (Young is also the poetry editor at fellow Condé Nast title The New Yorker.) Early in the administration, at least two museums closed their diversity departments. The Art Museum of the Americas canceled a show organized by Andil Gosine, the artist and author of the text Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada, and also canceled a show featuring artists from the African diaspora.

But can Trump actually steamroll through the Smithsonian and call in die-hard loyalists to eliminate “ideology” from the programming? Can he send 22-year-old culture-ignorant DOGE staffers into the redbrick Gothic Castle that James Renwick built in 1855 and have them start gutting the place à la USAID?

In what counts as good news these days, it might be tough for Trump to pull it off.

Here’s why: The Smithsonian is firewalled from changing administrations, protecting it from the vicissitudes of the executive branch—very much unlike the Kennedy Center, which has a board handpicked by the president, and now has a US president as its chair. Congress appoints the Smithsonian’s governing regents, who are expected to serve years—and sometimes decades—long terms.

“The Smithsonian is much more insulated from presidential oversight or control than an administrative agency in the executive branch would be,” said Richard H. Pildes, the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the NYU School of Law. “The president’s theory behind his effort to assert control over the Smithsonian is: The Smithsonian is part of the executive branch, and the president should be understood to have full control and supervision over the running of the executive branch. But the Justice Department has concluded many, many times over the years that the Smithsonian is not part of the executive branch, that it’s a unique entity from a legal perspective.”

One could argue that hasn’t stopped Trump before. He could just act as a king and flout the law by declaring himself the new secretary of the Smithsonian and presiding over the board of regents. But that would likely face heavy legal headwinds.

“There would be legal challenges,” Pildes said. “The fundamental point is that the Smithsonian is not part of the executive branch—as the Justice Department has recognized for decades and decades.”

And so the parliamentary procedures must be followed, and that’s an uphill battle for Trump. There are 17 members on the Board of Regents, and 6 are congressional figures: 3 senators selected by the President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley and 3 representatives chosen by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Regents generally stay in their positions until they leave office and are reappointed upon reelection—Senator Patrick Leahy served a full two decades, from 2001 to 2021. The current senators are John Boozman, Catherine Cortez Masto, and Gary Peters—who announced he won’t run for reelection, meaning a seat on the board will open in 2027, and the administration can pressure Grassley to appoint the MAGA-iest senator they can. (Not that Grassley is a rubber stamp on the president’s agenda.)

The three House members on the board are of course up for reelection, and could hypothetically be replaced by Johnson regardless of whether they win—though, if the Democrats take the House as oddsmakers are predicting, it would presumably be Hakeem Jeffries who will have the appointment power once their terms end and can slot in Democrats to take the place of the current Republican reps on the board, Adrian Smith and Carlos Giménez.

Then there are citizen members of the board. This is central to the Trump team’s plan to seize Smithsonian power. The executive order claims that Vance will “work with the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Senate Majority Leader to seek the appointment of citizen members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents committed to advancing the policy of this order.”

There are several current regents who are set to step down when their six-year terms end at various points over the next 18 months. Even if all six regents with terms ending in 2026 get replaced with right-wing cultural hardliners, they will get outvoted 10-7 when joined by Vance. Say, hypothetically, Trump tells the board to cancel a contemporary art show at the Hirshhorn that, when seen through Trumpvision, has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” as the order vaguely states. In that scenario, they get outvoted.

Got all that, Mr. President?

Is there a way for Trump to get around this? One scenario that was suggested to me by a source is quite alarming: Because there’s no statute claiming that the citizen members of the Board of Regents can only be fired for cause, Congress could vote to replace all nine citizen members with people who pass for cultural heavyweights in MAGA world—your Steve Wynns and Lee Greenwoods and Kid Rocks.

Again: Trump can’t just snap his fingers and make this happen like he did with the Kennedy Center; it has to go through Congress. The margins are already razor-thin—and you would have to assume that Smith and Giménez would not vote to kick their current fellow regents off the board. The votes determining the citizen regents who serve the Smithsonian are so bipartisan that it might not even be close. In 2023, when the House voted to reappoint three citizen regents—LACMA director Michael Govan, former News Corp. executive Toni Bush, and former Fed vice chair Roger Ferguson—the tally was 390 yeas and only 10 nays. (Representative Paul Gosar, the guy who posted an anime video of himself murdering Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, was one of the nays. After Gosar was censured by his House colleagues and removed from two committee assignments, he said, “There is no threat in the cartoon other than the threat immigration poses to our country. And no threat was intended by my staff or me.”)

But if Trump decided to make this a priority, he could force Johnson to whip the votes in the House to kick out the citizen regents and install lackeys. That’s way harder than using executive power to dismantle an agency, and he’d have to activate what’s proven to be an extraordinarily ineffective Congress. But it’s still a possibility, and with the nine Trump-chosen citizen regents and Vance, they would outvote the holdovers 10-7.

One major bulwark against the dissolution of the Smithsonian is that a Trump executive action trying to treat it like his personal plaything will inevitably meet a fusillade of lawsuits, which could wind up in the Supreme Court—where the Chief Justice happens to be on the Board of Regents. The Smithsonian Board is effectively run by Chief Justice John Roberts, who has served as chancellor since his 2005 appointment to the highest court in the land. Roberts calls most meetings to order, and in September 2016, he was on hand to deliver opening remarks at the NMAAHC, sandwiched between Angela Bassett, John Lewis, Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, Robert De Niro, and Barack Obama, with musical performances interspersed throughout.

“Thank you, Lonnie, for scheduling me right after Stevie Wonder,” Roberts deadpanned to Bunch as he started his speech.

It didn’t appear that Roberts thought a museum that highlighted the plight of African Americans would, as Trump’s order put it, “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” After solemnly detailing the Supreme Court cases that curtailed Black freedom in the US, Roberts recommended that, if you want to learn about the history of race in America, you should visit the museum.

“This museum provides a place for us to learn what life was like for those individuals who brought those cases to the Supreme Court,” he said. “If you want to know what those cases were about, you need to meet Dred and Harriet Scott, Plessy and Oliver and Leola Brown, and you can do that in this new museum.”

The Rundown

​​Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…Daniel Arsham, last seen making a terrifying sculpture of Zuck’s wife, is suing the rapper Quavo, formerly of Migos, for allegedly including his artwork Quartz Eroded 1961 Ferrari GT in a music video sans permission. The complaint was filed last week in the Southern District of New York, and it’s an extremely fun read. Things get started with that patented Arsham modesty: “Mr. Arsham is a New York based visual artist. He exhibits his work in galleries, fairs, and museums around the world. He is one of the most well-known contemporary artists in the world.” At one point, the complaint makes the case that, look, Arsham licenses out his artwork all the time, casually listing his collaborators: Tiffany & Co., Rimowa, Pharrell, Usher, Jay-Z, Gunna, The Weeknd, and Nas. It also mentions that “some of Mr. Arsham’s work—including the Artwork—sell for many hundreds of thousands of dollars.” That all said…Quavo maybe could have asked permission? (A rep for the rapper did not respond to a request for comment.)

…Busy week for our guy—Arsham is also out this week with a New Era collabo making New York Yankees ballcaps. Daniel Arsham, New Era, the Yankees…sounds like a right fit for everybody.

…The art market fell by 12% in 2024, according to the annual Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report released this week. A total of $57.5 billion in art was sold, significantly down from the $67.8 billion achieved in 2022. Some key stats: Public auctions are down a staggering 25% from the prior year, while sales of works above $10 million dropped by 39%. The good news is: It can only go up from here…right?

…But a down art market can’t stop…gala season! The big bash of the week this week went down at the Temple of Dendur in The Met Monday night: the annual YoungArts New York Gala, hosted by the organization’s board chair Sarah Arison, who has made sure that YoungArts can offer creatives in their late teens incredible residencies and support, now in its fifth decade. At The Met, I spotted a dizzying number of high profile artists, a few in no particular order: Taryn Simon, KAWS, Titus Kaphar, Camille Henrot, Julia Chiang, Glenn Ligon, and Kennedy Yanko. There was a smattering of YoungArts alums who performed throughout the night. There were ballet legends from two generations—Mikhail Baryshnikov and Misty Copeland—and two generations of MoMA directors: the outgoing Glenn Lowry and the incoming Christophe Cherix. And there were many other galas! The Bronx Museum and the Jewish Museum galas on Monday, the Public Art Fund Gala Wednesday, and the SculptureCenter Gala on Thursday. There might be more next week if the market doesn’t collapse again.

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