The Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents may have to get used to meetings where accountability is expected. At this week’s much-anticipated one, members yielded to President Donald Trump’s demand for an audit of politicized content. Alas, they also circled the wagons around Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, according to a document that summarized the secretive meeting held Monday, the board acceded to demands by Vice President JD Vance and Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL) to hold a thorough review of content at the complex’s 21 museums. The board reluctantly accepted this review even on an expedited matter, though it wanted to give Bunch three months to conduct it.

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“The board directed the secretary to assess content in museums and make needed changes to ensure unbiased content, including personnel changes,” a Smithsonian spokesman told the WSJ’s Natalie Andrews. “The board requested that the secretary report back on progress and suggested next steps.”

This was a victory for Trump, who, in March, issued an executive order that correctly noted that “over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” The president ordered the Smithsonian to “remove improper ideology from such properties.”

But the Smithsonian also issued a statement asserting its independence on personnel matters, indirectly rejecting Trump’s decision to fire Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery.

“Throughout its history, the Smithsonian has been governed and administered by a Board of Regents and a Secretary,” reads a statement quoted by AOL.com. “The board is entrusted with the governance and independence of the Institution, and the board appoints a Secretary to manage the Institution.”

The ordered review can’t come fast enough.

The Smithsonian has wholeheartedly enlisted in the leftist imperative to “decolonize the American mind” and to change America’s narrative from one that made citizens proud of this nation’s astonishing achievements to a counternarrative that focuses on where America has fallen short and drums shame into citizens. Unfortunately, this shift has accelerated since Bunch became the leader of the Smithsonian in 2019. With its 21 museums, 21 libraries, several research centers, and the National Zoo, the Smithsonian is the world’s largest research and museum complex.

Several years ago, the Smithsonian fulfilled the core mission of a top national museum, which, as with top universities, is to transmit to future generations what a people should know collectively, what we should all know about who we are, our past, our present, so we can then have a sense of what we can do together in our common efforts.

There is very little, if anything, in the National Museum of American History that will inspire you about America, that will teach you that, as the British historian Paul Johnson said, America’s story is “one of human achievement without parallel,” the story of “of difficulties overcome by skill, faith and strength of purpose and courage and persistence.” There is, on the contrary, much that will make you ashamed of your past, your history, and the country in general.

Take the museum collection called “Within These Walls,” about a house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where five families lived from the mid-1700s to the 1960s. That’s a period that comprises very heroic eras: the Revolution, the expansion to the West and the pioneer experience, the Civil War and the fight for emancipation, and the expansion of capitalism and industrialization in the northern cities.

Yet most of the display focuses on how black people, women, and immigrants were exploited during that time. The word “liberty” was mentioned only to ask, “Whose Liberty?” Other exhibits on cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago presented them as places where immigrants were treated badly.

During this time, 100 million immigrants came to the United States, more than to any other country in the world. We couldn’t have all been misinformed about the fate that awaited us here. Just a few steps away, at the same museum, there is a presentation called “De Ultima Hora.” It’s about Americans of Latin origin doing journalism. There was an exhibit on the ANSWER Coalition. A quite sympathetic one.

That’s interesting because the ANSWER Coalition is a communist group dedicated to dismantling the U.S. and the West. The monster who murdered the couple at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington in late May belonged at one time to the ANSWER Coalition. Not one single reporter I have talked to in the past two weeks has heard of the ANSWER Coalition. You know who has? The curator who put that entry there.

Meanwhile, at the National Gallery of Art, there is another sympathetic exhibit, this time on Elizabeth Catlett, a Marxist who settled in Mexico, renounced her U.S. citizenship, and used to carry water for the old Soviet Union.

But wait, there’s more. At the National Museum of African American History, I counted at least four likenesses of Angela Davis — more, I think, than there are of Martin Luther King. One of them called Davis a scholar activist, another had a poem that read, “the only thing you’re guilty of is being a black woman, to the core.”

That’s not quite right. Davis purchased the guns that were used in the Marin County Courthouse terrorist attack to kill a judge in 1970. She was on the FBI’s most wanted list. She ran for vice president twice on the Communist Party ticket. She is still an unrepentant communist, an ideology that has killed more than 100 million people.

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One can go on and on and on.

Yes, let’s have this audit. Right away. But Bunch, with his embrace of Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Project, and everything diversity, equity, and inclusion, is hardly the man who will lead the Smithsonian out of the impasse. The administration will not be able to avoid this problem much longer. Sajet is a political proxy war. What to do with Bunch will be direct political combat.