Earlier this month, when I visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (N.M.A.H.), President Trump’s signage warning of its “ideological capture” had yet to be installed. National Guardsmen marched in the paralyzing heat, which, along with the shadows cast by a revolving sculpture in the courtyard, suggested the eerie calm before the gunfight in a Western. Finally, the silence was broken by laughter—a group of volunteers from Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, who’d advised me, via text, to look out for “4 old white ladies 🧓🏼🧑🏼🦳🧓🏼🧑🏼🦳”
“I just think what’s going on is a false narrative,” Deborah Greenbush, a D.C. tour guide who’s taken countless visitors through the museum, said. “I have never once had any adult or youngster express the feeling that what they saw made them feel bad. If it’s factual and actual, we should talk about it.” Next to her were Cindy Stevens, a former public-housing administrator, and Pege Gilgannon, a former photojournalist, who wore a shirt emblazoned with the words “Free D.C.” (She frequently volunteers for the D.C.-statehood movement.) Leading the group was Patti Curtis, a STEM adviser at the Department of Education, who retired just before its DOGE-driven evisceration. “They eliminated the entire research department,” she said. “I’m grateful that the Smithsonian isn’t just rolling over like some of our federal agencies.”
The four women are neighbors, and belong to a nonprofit community for seniors. “It’s your second family,” Gilgannon explained. “So you don’t just sit there playing mah-jongg.” Last summer, Curtis persuaded them to join Citizen Historians, a grassroots effort to monitor Smithsonian exhibitions for political interference. She’d heard about the group from one of its founders, James Millward, a central-Asia scholar at Georgetown. “He said, ‘I’ve taught in China and seen history erased, and I don’t want it to happen here.’ ” Not long before, Trump had pressured the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, to resign, in part because his official portrait’s wall text mentioned his two impeachments. Curtis organized forty volunteers to photograph its collections; altogether, more than seven hundred people have participated in Citizen Historian campaigns.
Trump’s anti-Smithsonian crusade began in March, 2025, with an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” A declaration of war against a “revisionist movement” that saw America as “irredeemably flawed,” the order called for the removal of “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s twenty-one museums, and threatened to slash the institution’s funding if it didn’t comply. Soon, there were panicked reports—later debunked—that artifacts from slavery and the civil-rights movement had been quietly removed.
For a year, though, the Smithsonian has been spared, in part because of its semi-independent status. It’s governed by a seventeen-member Board of Regents, which includes the Vice-President, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, six federal lawmakers, and nine congressionally appointed members of the general public. The institution’s secretary, Lonnie G. Bunch III, has defended its integrity, but also shrewdly avoided provocative shows of resistance. Last August, he reportedly charmed Trump over lunch at the White House, and by the start of this summer’s Semiquincentennial celebrations, it was almost possible to believe that the Administration had moved on. Then, on July 4th, the White House Domestic Policy Council published a report called “Saving America’s Story,” which alleges that the N.M.A.H. has been hijacked by a cohort of radical activists. Shortly thereafter, Trump ordered the National Park Service to install warning signs outside the museum, whose director, Anthea Hartig, was summoned to testify on Capitol Hill.
“I was disturbed to hear about the quetzal,” Morgan Griffith, a congressman from Virginia, told Hartig, alluding to the suspiciously foreign bird feathers in a children’s show about money. (Quetzal feathers were once used as currency by the Aztecs and their trading partners in the American Southwest.) Nancy Mace, of South Carolina, called Hartig an ally of “queer pedophiles,” adducing, as evidence, a photo of RuPaul from an exhibition on American pop culture. Republicans also played a montage of Hartig making land acknowledgments, demanded to know why she’d once said that “loving America is very complicated,” and expressed outrage that no special exhibitions had been mounted about the Founding Fathers or the Declaration of Independence.
Representative Nancy Mace questioning Anthea Hartig, director of the N.M.A.H., about adult and L.G.B.T.Q. content at the museum.
Democrats denounced the proceedings as a totalitarian show trial. Their star witness, the Pulitzer-winning historian David W. Blight, called the White House report “a declaration of political war on the historian’s profession,” and scoffed at accusations of left-wing revisionism. “All history is revision,” he said. “Would you prefer your doctors not to be revisionists?” Hartig, by contrast, was polite almost to the point of meekness, constrained by her role to “Sir”ing and “Ma’am”ing her inquisitors while affirming her commitment to a patriotism that was “not instructed but inspired.” She invited lawmakers to “walk the building with me” and “stand in front of the Star-Spangled Banner, in awe”—implying, not without reason, that many had never even visited the museum they were so determined to control.
If they did come, the Citizen Historians were determined to get there first. Curtis unfolded a map of the museum with eight galleries circled in hot pink. “We powwowed last night and realized we could hit four of them,” she explained. “Rather than split up, let’s go together and saturate.”
“Can anybody read that?” Gilgannon whispered, holding her phone up like a flashlight.
“Yeah, ‘Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light,’ ” Curtis replied.
We were standing in the darkened chamber that houses the Star-Spangled Banner, whose tattered stripes were dimly visible behind glass. The flag was made by Mary Pickersgill, who sewed it with the help of her daughter, two nieces, and an “African-American indentured servant” named Grace Wisher. Curtis frowned. “Do we really think she was an ‘indentured servant’?” she asked, wondering if the label had originally read “slave.” Gilgannon sighed: “I hate how they put it in your head that you’re gonna get tricked.”
The White House report contends that N.M.A.H. has abandoned patriotism and erased the Founding Fathers in service of an “anti-white agenda” that seeks to “divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” But a quick search of the collections database revealed that nearly a hundred objects associated with George Washington and the Revolutionary War—including Washington’s uniform, his battle sword, and his dinner plates—were on display. From the Star-Spangled Banner, we made our way to Horatio Greenough’s 1841 sculpture of a shirtless, sword-bearing Washington, its caption explaining how the sculptor had captured his “highest and noblest virtues.” Greenbush, the tour guide, was amused by his neoclassically bare chest. “He would have been mortified, I’m sure.”
Behind Washington was “Many Voices, One Nation,” an exhibition about the struggle of disparate peoples to forge an American identity. A video collage showcasing America’s diversity played on loop near the entrance; Gilgannon, whose family comes from Belgium, said, “My mother’s in there.” The four women fanned out to photograph the objects on display: an Irish brooch, a Chinese-American shop sign, a collection of accessories abandoned by migrants in the Sonoran Desert. The report frames the show as “pro-illegal alien activism,” but hadn’t mentioned its Border Patrol uniform, whose caption praised the agent’s twenty-two years of service. Later, we gawked at the lavishly decorated 1963 Chevy Impala in “Corazón y vida,” another exhibit derided as a paean to “foreign” peoples—the Chicanos of Southern California, who started building “lowriders” with elaborate hydraulic systems in the nineteen-forties. “I think I’d be scared when it lifts up,” Curtis said, inspecting the undercarriage. “We went to see ‘The Odyssey’ in 4DX a few weeks ago and I was screaming!”
On the top floor was “American Democracy,” a sweeping exhibition about self-governance. Near the entrance was the desk where Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Farther in was paraphernalia from a quarter millennium of Presidential campaigns, including Trump’s. (There was even a MAGA hat.) The exhibition culminated in a display of protest signs. The report characterizes them as “almost all for various progressive causes,” and I quickly spotted slogans familiar from Black Lives Matter and the campaign for marriage equality. But equally prominent were “Secure Our Borders,” “Stop Abortion Now,” and projected footage from a Tea Party rally—all unmentioned. Gilgannon took a picture of one from the D.C.-statehood movement. “They practice and promote joy,” she explained. “At first, I thought, What’s this crazy woo-woo? But that’s what’s going to bond us together when we have to, like, fight the National Guard.”
