Trump wants to control what we are allowed to know.

The Trump administration escalated pressure on the Smithsonian this week, threatening to withhold federal funds if it does not submit extensive documentation for a sweeping content review. President Donald Trump earlier this year set out to purge what he called “improper ideology” from the nation’s most prestigious museum system, efforts that are expected to intensify as his administration tries to shape the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations next year.

Ah yes improper ideology, meaning history that Trump doesn’t want to hear about and doesn’t want us to hear about.

In a staff email obtained by The Washington Post, sent Friday evening after the funding threat, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said the Smithsonian had sent information to the White House in September and intended to submit more that day. He asserted that “all content, programming, and curatorial decisions are made by the Smithsonian.”

Well it sounds as if Trump is going to change that.

“Funds apportioned for the Smithsonian Institution are only available for use in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,’ and the fulfillment of the requests set forth in our Aug. 12, 2025 letter,” Haley and Vought wrote. The letter specifically referenced the Museum of American History, the Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum, the Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of African Art and the National Portrait Gallery.

Trump and his enforcers are not the right people to be “restoring truth and sanity” to anything, let alone to the Smithsonian.

An earlier letter, in August, called for an aggressive review of eight museums to ensure they align with the president’s directive to “celebrate American exceptionalism” and asked the Smithsonian tosubmit all requested materials within 75 days and “begin implementing content corrections” within 120.

It’s very totalitarian, this stuff. Normal presidents, even very conservative ones, don’t do this telling all the government institutions what to do thing – it’s not their job, it’s not their territory, it’s not what they’re hired to do. Trump doesn’t have the authority to do these things, but he’s doing them anyway.

The Trump administration amplified its rhetoric over the summer, with the president posting on social media that the nation’s museums are “essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE’” and that the Smithsonian is too focused on “how bad Slavery was.” 

Ah. Is that so. How focused is the right amount of focus, I wonder? Should we ignore it entirely? Should we pretend it just plain never happened, and that if it did happen it was a good thing? Do we all wish our grandparents and their grandparents had been enslaved? Do we think that’s a proud bit of our history? Do we buy the old Southern myth that slavery was a good thing for the enslaved?