What The Hell America!

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, I won an award that I didn’t understand, named for someone I’d never heard of: the Peter Goldin Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature.

I still don’t know who Peter Goldin was, but I like to think the award must have had something to do with analyzing (or, tbh, overanalyzing) text and subtext—exactly the tool I’ve needed to interpret politics all these years. It’s also the reason I’ve been fuming over Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order to disappear from our “national attic” all evidence of “woke,” mistakes, and regret, and restore monuments that honor people and events on the wrong side of history’s moral line.

This one short document hyperfocused on the Smithsonian Institution is just 1,150 words, but it is towering in its Stalinesque ambition to walk back history and whitewash America’s past.

So, with thanks to my high school English teachers for having shown me the importance of unpacking language, here’s a close reading of this order.

Let’s start with the title, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” As with most things Trump and MAGA, including another recent pronouncement about “preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections,” it says exactly the opposite of what it means. In both cases, the goal is to mute or silence voices Trump disagrees with.

Moving right along, Trump prefaces his demands with “it is hereby ordered” and claims to be acting within “the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.” Really? Does the Constitution say each president may rewrite history? Congress established the public-private Smithsonian Institution in 1846 to be the keeper and chronicler of America’s story; does the Constitution say anything about presidents dictating museum content at will?

No, but 62 percent of the twenty-one–museum complex’s $1 billion budget is funded by federal appropriations, grants, and contracts. And since the Republican-run Congress seems fine these days with letting Trump control the power of the purse the Constitution gave to . . . Congress, he can probably use threats and rescissions to do some damage.

Section 1 of the executive order begins with classic Trump projection, contending that a “revisionist movement” has made a “concerted and widespread effort” over the past decade to replace “objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” This is, in fact, exactly what Trump and his allies have been doing for the past decade.

He then claims that under these revisionists, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” So, so close. Of course our history is “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive”; you’d be hard pressed to find any country on earth that didn’t have a racist, sexist, oppressive past, and that most emphatically includes ours. America enslaved black people for over two centuries. Women didn’t get the vote until 1920. And people have rightly been grappling with those facts for a lot longer than just the last decade.

The most glaring mistake in this passage, the one that reveals it to be garbage, is the word “irredeemably.” America is anything but irredeemable. Time and again, we have confronted, corrected, and even transcended our tragic errors. That is how we have achieved our advances in “liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.”

The irony here is that Trump—along with Elon Musk, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and many others in his administration—is right now doing tremendous damage to liberty, individual rights, and human happiness. Abducting immigrants and throwing them into foreign prisons? Thoughtlessly firing government experts? Kicking patriotic transgender service members out of the armed forces? Gutting government grants on science? It’s not our historians and museum curators who are weaving that tale of woe and misery.

Trump says the Smithsonian rewrite of history “deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.” I’m not sure about that but I am sure that he’s responsible for huge waves of national shame today, as he cozies up to dictators, abandons Ukraine, turns allies into adversaries, and the Constitution into Swiss cheese.

And then there’s Sites of Conscience, an international organization that did a 2023 DEI training of park rangers at Independence Hall and other Old City sites in Philadelphia. Trump did not name the group but went after their website, which he said “advocates dismantling ‘Western foundations’ and ‘interrogating institutional racism.’” I could not find the language on their website; maybe you can. (Also, I’m good with interrogating institutional racism; let’s find it and get rid of it.)

Either way, I’ll give him that one. But there is so much more to unpack.

For instance, Trump attacks an exhibition on race and sculpture now showing at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. He accurately quotes the curators as saying that societies, including ours, “have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” History repeatedly shows that to be true.

The same exhibition, he says, “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’” But that’s in fact the truth, and badly in need of wider circulation. The idea of race as “something biologically real” is “arguably the greatest error modern Western science ever made,” Ohio State history professor Alice Conklin said at a 2021 forum.

The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, created by Congress in 2020 and opening in 2030 or later, gets dinged because, Trump claims, it “plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports,” a hit on the vulnerable transgender community and the museum’s goal of inclusiveness. The website right now mentions trans tennis player Renée Richards, who nearly a half-century ago fought to participate in tournaments and made the doubles finals of the U.S. Open but didn’t win, in its “LGBTQ women who made history section.” How the sports angle will play out is unknowable, but inclusion writ large isn’t going anywhere, at the museum or in the country.

Trump also targets the Museum of African American History and Culture for proclaiming that “‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture.’” Well, sort of. That’s from a 2020 graphic on “aspects and assumptions” of “whiteness and white culture.” It’s no secret why that would be, or why black people would want to discuss those assumptions, given the cruel realities of slavery that produced rampant stereotypes of African Americans as “lazy” and precluded, even punished, “individualism” and nuclear families.

I will say this: I visited the African American museum a year or two after it opened in 2016. The experience was deeply sobering—the Emmett Till casket and Middle Passage exhibits in particular.

It was also enlightening. One of the many things I learned was that in the early twentieth century, philanthropist Julius Rosenwald partnered with Booker T. Washington to build thousands of schools for black students in fifteen states. I saw desks and a wood-burning stove from “the Hope School in Pomaria, South Carolina, a historic Rosenwald school.”

That was inspiring, and so was a spontaneous exchange between a black visitor and a white museum guard about the guard’s ancestors—who were slave owners. There was even uplift at the gift shop, where I saw and immediately bought a pair of American flag earrings. I don’t know if they are still sold there, but I remember tearing up about that museum selling that symbol of a country still trying to recover from its original sin.

Trump claims he wants museums in Washington to be “places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” We did not encounter that.

But in the African American story of overcoming hardships and bias that still affect many black lives, we did see plenty of what Trump says he wants to encourage: tales 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.”

Beyond Independence Hall, which Trump says in his order should be restored in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year, it’s not clear what will be left after Vice President JD Vance completes the task set out for him in the executive order: “to remove improper ideology” from all of the Smithsonian museums, education and research centers, and even the National Zoo. Any giraffe that was a DEI hire, you’re fired?

Then there’s Trump’s instruction to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to restore federally controlled “monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” that have been removed or changed “to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”

These tributes to people and events, from colonial times to the Confederacy to now, were removed or changed in order to reflect a more patriotic, honorable reconstruction of American history that elevates contextual clarity over myths and romanticism. We’ll see which ones Burgum decides belong back in public view.

Trump has now made Vance and Burgum national arbiters of what constitutes “improper ideology,” and that’s a recipe for recreating the Smithsonian as a MAGA fantasyland. Women and minorities—do the math; that adds up to most of America—were oppressed or enslaved through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and didn’t start making significant headway against persistent racism and sexism until the mid-1960s. By tampering with reality, in museums and public policy, Trump is playing with political fire.