I Fact-Checked Trump’s Anti-Woke Report on the American History Museum

The document is notably short on evidence—and at odds with what I witnessed during a visit to the museum this week.

You can sort of tell the White House’s Domestic Policy Council knew it had a dud when it released its condemnation of the National Museum of American History over a holiday weekend. “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage” is a failure even when judged against the standards of the genre. It lacks the bitchy grandeur of a Joseph Epstein hit piece and the wacky verve of a Donald Wildmon sermon. More fundamentally, the report doesn’t have the goods. It’s the fruit of a “monthslong investigation,” according to the executive summary, but like much of President Donald Trump’s commemoration of the nation’s semiquincentennial—the blue sealant peeling from the $15 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool, that hunk of the Freedom 250 stage that fell and nearly killed rehearsing dancers on the National Mall—it’s a work of shoddy craftsmanship. 

Happily for the report’s authors, it was nearly impossible in the immediate aftermath of the report’s release to check its findings against the reality of the museum itself. It took me nearly an hour after I got off the subway on July 6 to get inside the building because Trump’s Great American State Fair, it turns out, runs through July 10. Not that many people were making their way into it, but the Mall itself was surrounded by fencing and Army trucks—this state fair looks more like an internment camp—and National Guard personnel patrolling the perimeter gave contradictory information about how to get around it. 

When finally I staggered into the National Museum of American History, I remembered my mixed feelings about the place. These objections have nothing to do with any evangelical leftism that the White House claims to have found there. Rather, I can’t square the museum’s mishmash of genuinely stirring artifacts (the Star-Spangled Banner, Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, the short-handled hoe that wrecked the backs of generations of California farmworkers until Cesar Chavez got it banned) with its pop-culture kitsch (Judy Garland’s ruby slippers, R2DT from Star Wars). The latter items really belong in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles or the Paley Center for Media in New York (though let’s keep Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet). Plus........

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