Trump’s Smithsonian Critique Is Pathetically Weak

The White House’s Domestic Policy Council is desperate to find fault with the National Museum of American History. It has failed miserably.

On Wednesday, I discussed how the White House Domestic Policy Council’s Saving America’s Story report makes a number of false claims about what’s missing from the National Museum of American History. Today, I want to discuss what the report finds objectionable that’s actually there—starting with the person who oversees it all. 

Surprisingly little of the report, which was released July 4, finds fault with what a visitor will encounter when visiting NMAH today. A huge chunk of it is devoted to the character assassination of Anthea Hartig, the museum’s director since 2019. The word “Hartig” appears 229 times, compared to 81 mentions for “visitor,” 73 mentions for “United States,“ 61 mentions for “National Museum of American History,” 49 mentions for “founder,” 49 mentions for  “president,” 38 mentions for “race,” 31 mentions for  “Congress,” 18 mentions for “ideology,” seven mentions for “bias,” five mentions for “ethnic,” and six mentions for “patriotism.” Firing Hartig is clearly Job One for this report. The Domestic Policy Council condemns Hartig for everything from identifying her pronouns as “she/her/hers” to saying she would like to “problematize” the semiquincentennial. As Philip Kennicott notes in an excellent essay about all this for The Washington Post, “Problematizing is the essence of historical thinking.”

I can’t defend Hartig’s public comments against 229 petty complaints because that won’t leave time for anything else, and anyway it’s a distraction from the topic at had, which is her museum. So let’s stick to the report’s criticisms of how NMAH presents the materials on display in what the........

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