On the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Trump Administration attempted to declare independence from history with the release of “Saving America’s Story.” Assigned an Orwellian title that obscures the effort to rewrite America’s story, the 162-page Domestic Policy Council report, published on the White House’s website on July 4, attacks the archivists, curators, educators, historians, and museum professionals who work at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. That the administration has chosen to do this at precisely the moment when it is gutting the National Archives and censoring historical exhibits at national parks demonstrates that the new report is just one part of a broader effort that threatens to reduce American history to conservative ideology.

The report follows President Donald Trump’s March 27 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order. And like so many Trump administration reports and statements, it can be seen as a classic example of projection, whereby the administration accuses others of doing exactly what it is doing. The report states, for example, that “museum leadership 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.” That is not an accurate assessment of the Smithsonian, but it is a pretty good description of the new report. 

What's more, the report includes multiple false claims about American history and the Smithsonian. To take one example, it is simply not true that the museum has “not created any exhibit dedicated to presenting a general narrative of American history” or telling the story of the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, or the U.S. Constitution. Nor is it true that the museum fails “to provide America’s young people access to what is genuinely........

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