WASHINGTON — Some of Washington’s top museums feature exhibits laced with an aggressively left-wing spin on American history, a Daily Wire review of Smithsonian exhibits found. Ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, President Donald Trump is taking action to weed out that ideology and historical spin from these institutions.
Americans who visit the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., might expect to learn about the factual history of the United States, to view American art and artifacts, and to be inspired by tales of American courage and valor. But visitors are often greeted with overt ideological content, gender ideology, and LGBTQ propaganda, or aggressive reframing of events like the COVID-19 pandemic or the Black Lives Matter movement.
That’s going to change.
In an August 12 letter, Trump officials Lindsey Halligan, Vince Haley, and Russ Vought informed Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch that the Trump administration will be conducting a “comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions” in fulfillment of the president’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
“This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” the Trump officials told the Smithsonian, noting that their review is “rooted in respect for the Smithsonian’s vital mission and its extraordinary contributions” and that they want to “support a broader vision of excellence that highlights historically accurate, uplifting, and inclusive portrayals of America’s heritage.”
The move comes amid widespread concerns about how Washington institutions have repackaged and represented American history in the nation’s capital — or interspersed woke ideology throughout the Smithsonian museums. While critics and media such as ABC News argue that the president is trying to make the museums align with his personal “view of American history,” the president’s team maintains that American history should not be framed or packaged through any ideological lens.
“It is an honor to work alongside the Smithsonian in reviewing its museums and exhibits, with the shared goal of ensuring this treasured institution reflects the very best America has to offer – accuracy, excellence, and the richness of our shared history,” Halligan, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary, told The Daily Wire. “While certain ideological influences have permeated the Smithsonian over time, our goal is for the Smithsonian to be fact-based, scholarly, and historically sound.”
“The current Smithsonian exhibits are publicly available so everyone can see firsthand what we have observed,” she added.
That includes the National Museum of American History, where visitors were greeted upon entry by a “Pride Progress” flag that consists of the white, pink, purple, black, and brown stripes representing the transgender pride flag and “LGBTQ people of color.” That flag is featured at the museum’s entrance on Constitution Avenue, according to tourists and visitors of the Smithsonian.
The museum’s “Change Your Game” exhibit “showcases dynamic stories and objects related to diverse inventors, athletes, and technologies that have changed how sports are played.” The exhibit includes a big display on gender testing in athletics featuring Caster Semenya and Mack Beggs. Semenya, who is not American, was born with a rare condition called hyperandrogenism, which causes higher testosterone levels in women. Beggs, a woman who identifies as a man, competed in female high school wrestling in Texas despite taking high doses of testosterone.
The display does not contain examples of men competing as women and dominating in female sports, which the majority of Americans oppose.
“Proponents believe that gender testing prevents transgender athletes and athletes with high testosterone levels from gaining an unfair competitive advantage,” reads the text of the display. “However, critics argue that gender tests are humiliating and discriminate against athletes who challenge traditional gender norms. How do you ensure fair play when identity is at stake?”
Down the hall, the “How Did We Become U.S.” / “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibit focuses little on the people who actually founded the United States and instead focuses heavily on slavery, the southern border, the “unsettling of the continent” that occurred as Europeans carried disease with them to America, and more.
Similarly, a “Rallying Against Racism” exhibit highlights how San Francisco Chinatown residents protested “Asian-American hate” at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibit quotes community leader Julie Tang saying: “We want everyone to know what we were worried about – our lives, our jobs, our businesses, and our survival in the United States.”
And the exhibit’s text reads: “As COVID-19 spread across the United States in early 2020, San Francisco’s Chinatown community was already shunned, even targeted by those who considered the disease ‘the China virus.’ Because Asian Americans had been subject to racist scapegoating and violence so often in the past, they organized a rally to call on their fellow citizens and residents’ to fight the virus not the people.’”
At the upcoming National Museum of the American Latino, the institution’s first exhibit will be “¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States,” which will tell the U.S. History from the perspectives of the diverse Latinas and Latinos who lived it and live it today.”
That perspective embraces a variety of left-wing causes, portrays the United States as an oppressor, and pushes for a more sympathetic view of immigrants, while notably failing to highlight the authoritarianism of figures like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez.
The exhibit describes the United States as having stolen about a third of Mexico in 1848, for example, and claims that Cubans came to America in search of economic opportunity, rather than escaping communism. It also suggests that the Texas Revolution was “What Anglo Saxon” settlers defending slavery from Mexican abolitionists, according to examples provided to The Daily Wire by tourists and visitors of the Smithsonian.
Down the street at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the “Cellphone: Unseen Connections” exhibit features “images of violence” against black Americans, quoting cartoon images of individuals saying things such as: “I can’t imagine the Black Lives Matter movement happening without cellphones. So much of it was driven by footage of injustice that people captured with their camera phones. Without brave bystanders using their phones to witness wrongdoing, the movement may not have gained ground.”
“Social movements around the world in the early 21st century attest to the impact of our mobile devices in connecting people, speaking truth to power, and sharing regional events widely in an instant,” the image text continues. “But forces of oppression use cellphones too. These powerful tools can catalyze both liberation and bondage.”
In the National Museum of African Art, the “John Akomfrah: Five Murmurations” exhibit addresses insights into “post-colonialism, diasporic experience and memory” through a dramatic, 55 minute long film that examines “the global COVID-19 pandemic, murder of George Floyd, and worldwide protests in support of Black Lives Matter in this visual essay of our times.”
That exhibit is located several stories under the ground, featuring audio and video from this period, painting a picture of a country where ruthless white supremacist police murder black Americans and shut down their protests.
“In one kaleidoscopic sequence, for instance, stills of the police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck are juxtaposed with archival photographs of the executed revolutionary Che Guevara and the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna’s ‘Lamentation over the Dead Christ,’” explains the New York Times.
“There’s something really Christlike about George Floyd’s aura in death,” the exhibit’s creator told the Times. “Part of it is just the very public nature of the death: The banality, the stupidity of it — the sheer awfulness of it — seemed to transform him into something else.”
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In the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, countless photographs, portraits, and pieces of artwork contain political or suggestive rhetoric designed to point the viewer in an ideological direction. For example, the text next to a painting of Francis Scotty Key includes a quick sentence about how “abolitionists noted the irony of a song about ‘the land of the free’ written by a staunch advocate of slavery with narrow views of freedom. “
And in the National Museum of Asian Art, which is supposed to highlight the artistic traditions of Asia, some exhibits focus on gender, sexuality, and power. The exhibit devotes significant real estate to Chapal Bhaduri, a man who liked to play female roles, fixating on how this man reflects the “exploration of identity” that the museum is so focused on. The exhibit quotes Pushpamala N, an Indian visual artist, saying that “To enter the skin of a person is to become that person … It’s a very liberating act.”
That museum also highlights the work of Chitra Ganesh, who “attempts to challenge patriarchal norms and empower her female and queer subjects by constructing alternate visual narratives,’ while drawing on South Asian visual traditions as well as canonical and contemporary feminist and queer scholarship.”
Ganesh’s work includes graphic pictures of bodies, supposedly women’s bodies, with their entrails hanging out, women in sexual positions, or with their limbs contorted in confusing arrays, and more.
The Smithsonian description reads: “Chimerical figures are torn asunder; legs and hands spin and contort while entrails spill out of torsos, giving birth to new life forms. Signature motifs abound, including the multiple eyes, which symbolize heightened perception and sexuality, and the acrobat, whose body can respond in unexpected ways to inhabit marginal spaces.”
Earlier this year, Trump removed Kim Sajet from her role as director of the National Portrait Gallery, calling her “a highly partisan person” and “a strong supporter of DEI.” The Daily Wire reported at the time that Sajet openly pushed diversity, equity, and inclusion from her position at the helm of a top United States museum.
Sajet, a long-time Democrat donor, served since 2013 as the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which contains 1,700 portraits of United States presidents and is located less than a mile away from the White House. A review of her remarks to the media shows that she was heavily focused on promoting and highlighting art based on ideology.
Her LinkedIn profile described the National Portrait Gallery as “not just a place to see famous Americans,” but a place that “explores identity as a social construct that has been shaped in equal measure by opportunity & ability, prejudice & fear, by taking a cross-disciplinary approach.”
On Sajet’s watch, the caption under Trump’s portrait read: “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election. He is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) to have won a nonconsecutive second term.”
Sajet’s departure followed Trump’s March 27 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which promised to “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness — igniting the imagination of young minds, honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.”
“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 stated. “This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”