Steve Macek Project Censored
On September 8, historian Lonnie G. Bunch III announced that he was resigning as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, a federal government-created educational nonprofit and trust, which manages eighteen museums including the National Museum of American History (NMAH), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Since taking over as head of the Smithsonian in 2019, Bunch, the founding director of the NMAAHC, has supported efforts to include the stories of people of color, women, and other disempowered groups in the Institution’s presentation of US history, championing and fundraising for a new National Museum of the American Latino and a proposed Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. These efforts made Bunch and the museums he helms the target of intense criticism from Donald Trump and other Republican politicians, who have repeatedly blasted the Smithsonian for being “woke” and too focused on “oppressors and the oppressed.” The Smithsonian fracas is only the most visible front in the Trump administration’s broader campaign to control how we remember the American past, a campaign that echoes how authoritarian regimes elsewhere have censored and rewritten their own national histories. The parallels between the administration’s drive to control history and its effort to muzzle the press and cut off public access to information are too glaring to ignore.
On March 27, 2025, Trump signed an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” bemoaning a supposedly widespread movement to “rewrite” American history by casting the nation’s “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” The order claimed that “the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and “has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” The order instructed Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian board, to work to remove “improper ideology” from Smithsonian displays and to prohibit spending on exhibits or programming “that degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”
In May 2025, Trump tried to fire Kim Sajet, then-director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, whom he denounced as “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.” She later resigned. Museum studies scholar Suse Anderson told the New York Times the attack on Sajet and the Portrait Gallery was designed “to disempower and discredit those who are working within these institutions to tell a more complete and complex American story.”
In August 2025, Trump sent Bunch a letter asking for his cooperation in a “comprehensive internal review” of the public-facing content and exhibition planning at NMAH, NMAAHC, NMAI, and five other museums. The review’s stated aim was “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,” particularly in preparation for the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations. The letter asked Bunch to send the administration reams of material on “the chain of command” for approving exhibits and programs, details about current and upcoming exhibits, curatorial and staff manuals, and any educational materials linked to current exhibits and visitor surveys within 30 days.
Then, on July 4, 2026, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a lengthy report, “Saving America’s Story,” that rehearsed a litany of grievances about the NMAH, insisting that it “has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” The report claimed the NMAH had downplayed and denigrated the role of Christianity in shaping the nation and its founding ideals, engaged in “anti-white” activism (by creating programming for every major demographic except “whites, Christians, males and Americans”), cast immigrant rights activism—which it labels “illegal alien political activism”—in “heroic terms,” created youth-facing exhibits with “sexually explicit or sexually suggestive content,” and generally framed the national heritage as an object of “disdain.” The authors argued that NMAH should instead “teach the history of an American nation that is worthy of our affections and worth passing along to future generations.”
Historians pushed back almost immediately. As the Organization of American Historians argued, the report is best seen as one salvo in a multi-pronged campaign to coerce the Smithsonian into bending its presentation of history to suit the MAGA political agenda. It transparently aims to “impose a narrow, singular, and celebratory narrative of American greatness populated by a mythologized set of heroes” and would “erase the conflict, struggle, and diversity—the complexity—that have always defined the American experience.”
A few weeks after “Saving America’s Story” was released, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Park Service to place signs outside the NMAH warning visitors about the allegedly inaccurate and unpatriotic nature of its exhibits. Then, just days before Bunch’s resignation, on August 28, the Department of the Interior sent a letter to the Smithsonian threatening to withdraw support for the institution because of its “culture of ideological activism” and demanded an in-person meeting to discuss concerns.
Beyond the Smithsonian
Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian is part of a larger pattern of his administration tampering with and attempting to sanitize the way the national past is remembered and commemorated.
In January 2026, for example, Trump ordered the National Park Service (NPS) to remove a slave memorial outside The President’s House in Philadelphia, which honored nine people enslaved there by President George Washington. In June 2026, reporting revealed that the administration removed dozens of plaques, exhibits, and films from thirty-seven sites managed by the NPS that it claims “disparage Americans.” Among the items removed was an “African American Civil War Memorial wayside” on the National Mall in Washington, DC. On June 12, a federal judge ordered that all the signs be reinstalled, noting that the White House actions “set a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.”
In February 2026, the NPS removed a large rainbow pride flag from the Stonewall national monument in New York City. The monument commemorates the 1969 uprising that broke out following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a foundational event in the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. LGBTQ+ activists and historical preservationists challenged the flag’s removal in court. In April, the Trump administration agreed to settle the lawsuit and once again hang a pride flag at the Stonewall site alongside a US flag.
The Biden administration had changed the names of several military bases named for Confederate officers, including renaming Fort Bragg in North Carolina as Fort Liberty. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has systematically restored the names of these bases to their pre-Biden names (by finding service members with the same last names as the Confederate leaders to ostensibly honor). In addition to Fort Bragg, the names of “Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Pickett and Fort Robert E. Lee in Virginia, Fort Gordon in Georgia, Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana and Fort Rucker in Alabama” were restored to their earlier names.
Hegseth has also removed the names of Harvey Milk, Harriet Tubman, and other civil rights leaders from US Navy ships. Claiming he was merely “taking politics out of ship naming,” Hegseth’s decision to strip the name of murdered gay rights activist Harvey Milk, a Navy veteran, from a Navy oil service vessel took effect at the start of Pride Month. Critics charged that the change was an effort “to erase the contributions of LGBTQ+ people and an insult to fundamental American values of honoring veterans.”
In 2019, the New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning multi-part series, The 1619 Project, about the impact of slavery, racism, and Black freedom struggles on every aspect of life in the United States, from politics and culture to the economy, agriculture, urban design, and the criminal justice system. In response, the Trump administration established the 1776 Commission in 2020 to counter what it called a “radicalized view of American history,” embodied by efforts like the 1619 Project, and to promote “patriotic education.” The Trump commission’s members were a hodgepodge of conservative politicians, academics, and activists, including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, then-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, and a single professional historian, Victor Davis Hanson. The Commission released a partisan, error-filled report just days before the end of Trump’s first term. Biden terminated the task force on his first day in office. In 2025, Trump issued an executive order reinstating the Commission.
Finally, in the lead-up to the July celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the Trump administration deployed six “Freedom Trucks,” mobile museums with displays about the country’s founding and history housed in eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers, to traverse the country. As Guardian reporter Ed Pilkington described the Freedom Truck exhibits, they depicted the United States “as a white Christian nation,” lauded the contributions of white male leaders to the country’s development, and stressed “God as the source of the country’s greatness” while mentioning women, immigrants, and people of color only occasionally.
The Authoritarian Playbook
None of this is unique to the United States. Authoritarian, ultra-nationalist regimes around the world have long relied on the same playbook of censorship and historical mythologization now being employed by Trump.
Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party in 2018 passed a law making it a civil offense to assert that the Polish state or the Polish people were complicit in the Holocaust. In 2022, two Polish researchers, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, who co-edited a book about the involvement of Catholic Poles in the Nazi genocide of the Jews, were convicted of violating that law (although an appeals court ultimately overturned the conviction).
In Putin’s Russia, it is a crime to disseminate “false information about the activities of the USSR during the Second World War,” to circulate “manifestly disrespectful information about the dates of military glory and memorable dates of Russia relating to the defense of the Homeland,” or to desecrate “symbols of Russia’s military glory.” According to a 2018 study by the Agora rights organization, seventeen Russian historians, researchers, and professors have been prosecuted for undesirable comments or findings concerning World War II.
Ever since India’s authoritarian, Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, “history has been under siege,” Suchintan Das wrote in a 2024 Jacobin article. The government has installed loyalists who hold a Hindu-centric view of Indian history in the leadership of historical research institutions across the country. It has censored and rewritten textbooks and syllabi used in schools to minimize the contribution of Muslims and secular political movements to the country’s development, while at the same time deleting references to Hindu supremacist violence like the 2002 Gujarat riots. It has also promoted a mythic and factually dubious representation of ancient Indian culture through its social media and public pronouncements.
The Far Right’s Fixation with Rewriting the Past
Why do Trump, Modi, Putin, and other right-wing nationalists expend so much energy censoring, managing, and rewriting their nations’ histories?
Right-wing nationalist ideology celebrates a particularly narrow, often racist vision of a hierarchical, usually ethnically homogeneous nation. Narrating national history is a primary means of defining who belongs—usually the dominant racial, ethnic, or religious group—and who can be excluded as alien or other—usually oppressed racial, religious, sexual, and even political minorities.
The mythic vision of the past favored by Trump and fellow autocrats is rooted in a narrative of national greatness that has supposedly been interrupted or subverted by assorted national enemies (liberals, socialists, communists, immigrants, Muslims, feminists, the LGBTQ community) and which only “strong” leaders will be able to restore. Hence, rewriting history serves to legitimate the authoritarian rule of leaders such as Trump, Putin, and Modi and to cast what are, in fact, abuses of power as necessary and justified.
Trump and other far-right politicians believe that the entire purpose of teaching history is to inspire patriotism and unthinking devotion to the nation. Hence, their preference for focusing the national narrative on a succession of heroes, whom schoolchildren are supposed to admire and seek to emulate. In his various denunciations of the Smithsonian and the 1619 Project, for example, Trump repeatedly complained that their version of US history was teaching students to “hate America.” Rarely has Trump or anyone in his administration expressed concern that students learn accurate, scholarly history about the economic and social realities, struggles, injustices, and conflicts that shaped ordinary Americans’ lives.
Trump and other right-wing authoritarians want to erase evidence of past resistance to oppression and past movements for social change—because those stories are a source of inspiration for people fighting similar battles today.
Controlling the historical record is about much more than deciding what appears in a museum exhibit or a school textbook. A society that cannot honestly confront the conflicts, injustices, and struggles of its past loses an essential resource for understanding its present and imagining a different future. Political decree cannot make the past simpler, cleaner, or more patriotic; historians and historical institutions must preserve its complexity and make the evidence available for citizens to examine, debate, and learn from. Democracy needs truthful, fact-based history just as it needs truthful, fact-based journalism. That is why we must push back against the Trump administration’s attempt to control American history.
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