The world-renowned Smithsonian Museums give America a negative reputation.
At least, that’s what Donald Trump thinks.
The museum is the latest target of Trump’s ‘clean-up’ of Washington DC. He claims it focuses too much on ‘how bad slavery was’, and spreads ‘anti-American ideology’.
The White House has said current and former exhibitions at the museum will undergo a review to make sure they align with Trump’s agenda and view of history.
Historian and propaganda academic Ian Garner told Metro: ‘What Trump is doing looks like a pretty naked attempt at sanitising history in order to maximise his own power.’
If Trump’s attempts to change how the Smithsonian retells the story of America, he could go beyond skewing understanding of the past and present – but also the direction of the future, Garner warned.
‘We’ve moved beyond Orwell’
‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.
‘And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.’
Those words were written by George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984. Regarded as his magnum opus, it is a critique of authoritarianism and warns against the loss of individual thought.
It ends with the protagonist Winston Smith agreeing with ‘Big Brother’, which represents the authoritarian government that wants him to believe that 2+2=5.
But Garner points out: ‘We now live in a world where we can have the main character believing that 2 + 2 equals 5, but also 10, 12, 14, 28, and anything else, because people can hold all of these things in their heads all at once in the digital world. And that’s something that we haven’t faced before.
‘We’ve moved beyond Orwell, because we’re no longer living in the world of analogue communications of television and newspapers. Orwell couldn’t have conceived the confusion that we end up with in the present, in the social media era, where reality can be constantly reconstructed,’ he added.
That reconstruction of reality is still in its early stages, Garner said, but the danger is real and needs to be recognised.
Why does Trump want to reform the Smithsonian?
There are a few displays and museums that Trump isn’t happy with.
One exhibit is about Benjamin Franklin, and lists his scientific discoveries, linking them to the slaves he owned.
Another reference is to George Floyd’s death, which Trump says puts police in a bad light.
Trump wrote on Truth Social: ‘The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.’
But the museum has already made changes to its exhibits, removing mentions of Trump’s impeachment at the American History Museum.
If Trump goes further in his attempts to amend exhibits and how they portray history, Garner explained it would damage the reputation of the museum and perpetuate the idea that there is a ‘false history’ and a ‘real history’.
The danger of deeming things ‘woke’
Past autocracies have had words for things they deem false, or not enough in line with the country – Stalin referred to these things and ideas that weren’t loyal to the Soviet Union as ‘cosmopolitan’.
Trump’s word of choice? ‘Woke’.
In a tangent on Truth Social about museums, Trump wrote: ‘I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities, where tremendous progress has been made.
‘This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the “HOTTEST” Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.’
‘Woke’ is an empty vessel of a word, which has become meaningless, Garner argues – but by deploying it, people like Trump and his allies are trying to shut off or close off discussion about the past.
The history of authoritarian governments altering the past
Historically, governments have always wanted to control elements of the past, pump out certain narratives.
But the more authoritarian the government becomes, the more that version of the past becomes central to their governing idea, and the less tolerance they’re able to allow in representing the past.
‘Everybody does it,’ Garner said. ‘But more recently, Hitler did it, Mussolini did it, Stalin did it, and Putin does it. So it doesn’t matter whether Trump now goes ahead and changes exhibits in the Smithsonian or not.
‘What matters is that he’s put out the idea that this should happen, that the Smithsonian is some sort of “woke” institution that needs to be reformed.’
‘They bury it under this torrent of emotion, so that we’re not really talking about the past at all. We’re just talking about anger, about fury, about rage, disillusionment,’ Garner adds.
‘And these are the emotions that brought Trump to power in the first place. That’s what he wants people to be engaging in, not the history or the present or the future of the country at all.’
It’s unclear how far the overhaul of museums in Washington, DC, will go, but if it’s anything like Orwell wrote about in his novel, it won’t stop just at reangling history in museums: ‘Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful.
‘Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration.’
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