Donald Trump has made it his personal mission to shape the aesthetics of Washington, D.C., to his own liking, but his latest visual tweak is fueled by pure partisan ego, rather than any sense of design.
The president’s administration is reportedly planning to spend $84,000 hanging large signs outside of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History that accuse the venerated institution of presenting a biased version of the past. In a letter obtained by The Atlantic, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wrote that the signs would detail the “personal viewpoints that the curators of the exhibits are seeking to advance.”
Burgum’s line isn’t a new one. Back in March 2025, Trump signed a lengthy executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which specifically mentioned the need to “remove improper ideology” from Smithsonian properties. Then, in July, Trump signed an executive order to install temporary signage to put his own interpretation of history in front of the museum’s guests. Those signs are soon to go up.
Trump’s dispute with the Smithsonian is both simpler and stupider than you would expect: He believes the museum, which has served as a living record of centuries of American history since the 1960s, has gone too woke.
“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” read the July executive order. “This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
The key points of contention revolve around how the Smithsonian, which also operates the National Museum of African American History and several other properties, has presented the country’s history with race and racism. Trump and his ideological allies have worked for years to soften or even distort unflinching depictions of America’s violent and racist past, claiming that they portray the country in a needlessly negative light. They’ve also taken issue with exhibits at the Smithsonian that acknowledge transgender or gender non-conforming Americans and grapple with the country’s complex history of sexual and gender politics.
According to The New York Times, letters from the Interior Department said that the prospective signs would “ensure parents bringing young children to the museum are equipped to protect the well-being of their children,” warning of exhibits that “present ideological viewpoints inconsistent with biology, including ideologies that sex is not binary, that biological men can be women and that biological men should be permitted to compete in women’s sports.”
What Trump has done, in effect, is made some of D.C.’s most vital institutions — the drivers of tourism and culture in the nation’s capital — into a battleground for the far right’s most specific culture war grievances. That, it seems, is Trump’s legacy, a version of American history where his own ego and grievances matter more than the scholarship or art of any of his constituents.
