The White House has launched its latest culture-war salvo, this time against one of the country’s most popular museums.
The White House Rapid Response account posted a thread accusing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of filling a family institution with what it called “sick, explicit content.” The thread was produced alongside a 162-page White House report, compiled by the Domestic Policy Council under former Trump speechwriter Vince Haley, accusing the museum of abandoning objective scholarship in favor of “extreme political activism.”
It also objected to video clips of drag queens, images of nude women, the iconic 2003 Entertainment Weekly “Dixie Chicks Come Clean” cover, and a copy of Girl Germs, a feminist zine created by University of Oregon students in 1990. “A magazine promoting ‘female masturbation,’” the White House complained, referring to the cover, which features two females in a romantic tangle.
The administration also took issue with the museum’s contextualization of American cultural icons. It objected to descriptions of Mickey Mouse as having ties to the “vestiges of longstanding traditions of blackface minstrelsy,” the ukulele as “a product of U.S. imperialism,” and Wild West shows as turning the “subjugation of Indigenous people into theater.” Cultural historians have long made similar arguments about all three.
The founding of America also came in for complaint. The White House objected to Christopher Columbus being described as a “murderer,” “slaver,” and “thief,” the Pilgrims being called “colonizers,” and Thanksgiving being linked to a “National Day of Mourning.” Historians widely agree that Columbus participated in the enslavement of Indigenous people, the Pilgrims did establish an English colony, and many Indigenous activists have observed a National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving since 1970.
The White House also took aim at the Benjamin Franklin exhibit, complaining that 20 percent of the space was devoted to enslaved people and that visitors were asked whether Franklin conducted electric shock experiments on enslaved people, which it said was done “with zero evidence.”
Franklin did own enslaved people earlier in his life before freeing them and becoming an abolitionist and president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. There is no credible historical evidence that he used enslaved people in his electrical experiments, though it is known that he experimented on people generally.
The administration also objected to the museum celebrating Angela Davis, whom it described as “a Marxist who ran for VP as a Communist in 1980” and who “called for abolishing police and jails.” Davis was acquitted on all charges following a highly publicized 1972 trial connected to a 1970 courthouse attack. Supporters regard her as a major figure in the civil rights, Black liberation, and feminist movements.
The White House also flagged other exhibits as objectionable: a “crotch harness,” a “trans nonbinary” person’s “chest binder,” and pages from a 6-year-old girl’s diary in which she prays “every night for my penis to grow.” “This sick material is sexualizing kids,” the White House wrote.
The Smithsonian rejected the White House’s characterization, saying it has served the public through independent, nonpartisan scholarship for more than 180 years. Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch defended the museum’s role in helping Americans understand the “complexity and nuance” of the nation’s history. The report follows Trump’s executive order seeking to eliminate federal support for what he calls “divisive narratives” at the Smithsonian.
The White House thread concluded by declaring the findings proof of “Radical Left ideological capture of the Smithsonian—which the Trump Administration is rightfully correcting.”
