Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868), Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain. 
Gilbert Stuart (1775-1828), George Washington (Lansdowne Portrait), April 12, 1796, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, public domain
Precis: The White House Domestic Policy Council’s July 4, 2026 report Saving America’s Story is not a neutral audit of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History but a prosecutorial brief designed to declare the Smithsonian’s present leadership illegitimate and establish a political justification for intervention.
The Saving America’s Story Report
“Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness… To the security of a free constitution it contributes in various ways… by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority…”
George Washington, First Annual Address to Congress, January 8, 1790
The first fact to clear up about the White House Domestic Policy Council’s 162-page report “Saving America’s Story” is that this is not a disinterested review of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH), its management or exhibitions. It is certainly not a consideration of the role of museums of history in society – not in a democratic society.
The report’s conclusion was written into its premise. The White House defines a successful historical museum as one that produces unity, pride, and affection for the nation. According to its point of view, this should be the goal of all Smithsonian museums.
Edwin White (1817-1877), Washington Resigning His Commission, 1858, The Annapolis Complex Collection, Maryland, public domain.
In keeping with this pro-pablum policy, the report treats museum material that makes visitors feel uncomfortable as evidence of disunity and “ideological capture.” According to the report, historical accuracy is not determined by whether a museum’s presentation is rooted in historical evidence, but by whether the interpretation leaves visitors with the approved emotional response. Although the White house presently lacks authority to enter the American History Museum and change the museum’s exhibitions, its Executive Order 14416 directs the Secretary of the Interior and the National Park Service to put up temporary signage on the Smithsonian’s sidewalks regarding the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence; figures generally associated with the warm, patriotic feelings endorsed by the current administration.
Yet, the Founding Fathers had ideas of their own that might surprise the current administration – ideas about the value of free expression, education, and diversity. For instance, Thomas Jefferson’s Preamble to a Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, Fall 1778, Papers 2:526—27
“…experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate… the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes… and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance . . .”
Mather Brown (1761–1831), Thomas Jefferson, 1786, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, USA, public domain.
‘Multiculturalism’ is not a word that existed in 1778 or in the vocabulary of the Founding Fathers, but the concept is evident in Jefferson’s phrase, “possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries.” Other key concepts expressed there – the value of education, the importance of the study of global history, and the role of an enlightened populace in holding corrupt and power-hungry leaders to account. The continuing passage also reflects Jefferson’s innate elitism – it is not all citizens, whose access to education should be assured, but only the brightest, who appear naturally suited to public service.
Regrettably, it is the word ‘disingenuous’ that most frequently comes to mind when reading the White House report. It states that museums should present “the good and the bad” while simultaneously insisting that the governing story must be one of national nobility, progress and redemption. Wrongdoing may be included, but only inside a narrative in which American founding principles are shown to have ultimately cured American injustice. The report’s rhetoric presents a fixed, incontrovertible narrative, oddly reminiscent at times of propaganda from the former Soviet Union. At the end of all human strife and the culmination of all social development, the outcome will be a sort of perfected Americanism. Russia’s answer was perfected Communism… and we all know how that ended.
Altogether this is a shoddy pretense of an analysis, from which actual analysis is missing. There is no methodological section explaining how displays were sampled, how interpretations were evaluated, which historians were consulted, whether temporary exhibitions were distinguished from permanent galleries, or whether the museum was invited to answer the report’s allegations. Instead, it compiles quotations, archived webpages, staff training documents, isolated labels and program descriptions into a case against the institution. It is an opposition-research dossier, not a professional museum assessment.
Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), Thomas Jefferson, 1805, New York Historical, public domain.
The report ultimately declares that the museum and Smithsonian leadership “cannot be trusted.” The administration has followed the report up with President Trump’s Executive Order 14416 in July 2026, “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution,” ordering that warnings be placed at the museum entrances stating that “that current leadership of both the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum cannot be trusted to tell America’s story with honesty and gratitude.” That is not analytical language. It is delegitimizing language alleging that presenting controversial subjects is evidence of disloyalty.
(Shades of the notorious 1937 Nazi Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich! Its wall slogans included “Insolent mockery of the Divine under Centrist rule,” “Deliberate sabotage of national defence,” and “Nature as seen by sick minds,” and “Even museum bigwigs called this the ‘art of the German people.’” The exhibition consisted primarily of works by German artists: Georg Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, and Kurt Schwitters but also included works by foreigners: Pablo Picasso, Grant Wood, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky.)
From ceremonial partnership to administrative takeover
Gilbert Stuart (1775-1828), Portrait of James Madison, circa 1805-07, commissioned by Honorable James Bowdoin III, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, public domain.
The contrast between today and President Trump’s first term is striking. During his February 2017 visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, President Trump praised the museum for honoring Black men and women’s contributions to national heritage and described it as a source of national pride.
The president’s second-term posture is completely different. The Saving America’s Story report is the follow-up to Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” of March 2025, which declared that federal historical sites should be “solemn and uplifting” monuments to American greatness.
Executive Order 14253 instructed Vice President JD Vance, through his position on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to remove what the administration called improper ideology. It instructed Vance and the Office of Management and Budget to work with Congress to stop money supporting exhibits that allegedly degraded shared values or divided Americans by race. Under its terms, any historically serious account of Indian wars, slavery, segregation, or immigration exclusion could be accused of dividing Americans “based on race” or “degrading a national value.”
So, what are our most important ‘national values’? Let’s ask James Madison.
“In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects… Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.”
James Madison, standard attribution, Federalist No. 51, February 8, 1788. Yale Law School, Avalon Project
Paperwork as ideological surveillance, funding as weapon
John Trumbull (1756-1843), John Adams 1793, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, public domain.
At the end of May 2025, President Trump announced that he was firing National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet “for being a strong supporter of DEI.” He did not possess that authority: Smithsonian personnel decisions belong to the Secretary, subject to the Board of Regents. The Board said so publicly and stated that Lonnie Bunch retained its support. But the Board also ordered Bunch to make changes to ensure “unbiased” presentations and report on possible personnel action. Sajet resigned days later. President Trump therefore obtained her removal without possessing the legal power to do it. Every museum director took heed.
The “Saving America’s Story” report is a skirmish in another battle that began with an August 12, 2025 White House letter to Secretary Bunch ordering a review of eight Smithsonian museums and compelling each museum to submit digital copies of past and future exhibition plans, copies of didactics and catalogs, labels, and social-media content. It also called for interviews with curators and senior staff and for developing “narrative standards.” The stated goal was “alignment with American ideals,” but the process would enable an AI run-through to pick out keywords like ‘prejudice’ and other concepts too dangerous for public presentation. It also enabled assigning blame to specific people who approved a display or a signboard. Purposefully or not, it incentivized future self-censorship.
The letter stated that within 120 days, the eight museums should “begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials.”
John Trumbull (1756-1843), Portrait of Alexander Hamilton, 1792, Shared by Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, public domain.
A December 18, 2025 letter from the White House, Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials tightened the screws. It was signed by Vince Haley, Director of the Domestic Policy Counsel and Russel Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget and stated that the Smithsonian’s initial production of documents was inadequate and demanded much more. It also connected compliance to the availability of appropriated money: either disclose the entire curatorial process and demonstrate ideological correctness in line with Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” or risk losing basic funding.
Congress, not the White House, ordinarily looks at whether Smithsonian money was lawfully spent, collections were protected and ethical standards were observed. It was to prevent abuses of power like these that the Founding Fathers designed a tri-partite system of Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches in order to set checks and balances to the power of each.
“The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients. The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries.”
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 9, November 21, 1787. Yale Law School, Avalon Project
The “Saving America’s Story” report jumps to the next stage of White House control. It sets out a catalogue of alleged offenses, assigns personal responsibility to National Museum of American History director Anthea Hartig and portrays Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch’s administration as incapable of self-correction. The report stops just short of saying “fire Hartig” or “fire Bunch,” but its findings supply a ready-made rationale for demanding resignations, Board action or congressional testimony. Bunch and Hartig have both described the report as an unfair characterization while defending the Smithsonian’s commitment to accuracy and institutional integrity.
What “Americanism” means to the White House
Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), Thomas Jefferson, between 1805-1818, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, public domain.
The White House’s preferred history has several identifiable components. It requires a dominant Founding narrative. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, the Revolution, the Declaration and the Constitution are to be the moral framework through which later history is judged. But there’s a twist. Exhibitions will be expected to emphasize natural rights, constitutional government, individual liberty, national progress and the continuity between the Founders’ ideals and subsequent reforms – that is, showing that these estimable goals have been achieved.
Likewise, it requires a redemptive account of slavery. The report says the colonies “inherited” slavery from global and European practices and emphasizes British restrictions on colonial attempts to limit the trade, a narrative that reflects a highly selective viewpoint and a poor grasp of history.
The Slave Trade Act of 1807 prohibited the Atlantic slave trade in the British Empire. Britain’s subsequent Slavery Abolition Act took effect in 1834, making ownership of slaves illegal in most colonies. It was followed by a forced apprenticeship period that ended in 1838. The Indian Slavery Act of 1843 extended formal abolition and banned the legal ownership of slaves within the territories ruled by the East India Company.
It is true that in 1807, three weeks before Britain abolished the Atlantic slave trade, President Jefferson signed a law prohibiting “the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States,” but slavery in the U.S. ended only with the Civil War.
Portrait of Yarrow Mamout (Muhammad Yaro), 1819, Charles Wilson Peale,
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Muslims also used literacy to leverage their freedom through their labor. After 44 years of being enslaved, Mamout became an entrepreneur, bank investor and homeowner in Georgetown, where he would walk the streets singing the praises of Allah.
Equally to the point, every American would benefit by knowing more about the debates that raged over slavery in the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson condemned the transatlantic slave trade as “piratical warfare,” an execrable commerce” and “assemblage of horrors.” In Jefferson’s deleted passage in the Declaration, he blamed King George III for sustaining it:
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
Yohuru Williams, quoting Thomas Jefferson, 1776, Why Thomas Jefferson’s Anti-Slavery Passage was Removed from the Declaration of Independence, May 28, 2025, History.com
However, Congress, sitting in the Committee of the Whole on July 3-4, 1776, deleted Jefferson’s 168-word passage. In his autobiography, Jefferson noted:
“The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, January 6, 1821, Yale Law School, Avalon Project
The White House report tries to turn emancipation and civil rights into proof that the Founding Fathers’ principles worked as intended. But ending slavery required another century, filled with enslaved people’s resistance, abolitionism, civil war, and the Reconstruction Amendments. Dealing with slavery’s consequences is certainly not over, despite federal legislation and another century and a half of struggle. The report’s “colorblind standard derived from the founding documents” skips over the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the federal civil-rights laws that materially changed the constitutional order.
Rehabilitating a Christian civilizational narrative
Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), Thomas Jefferson, 1800, White House Collection, Washington, DC, public domain.
The Saving America’s Story report objects that the American History Museum protrays Christianity principally in relation to conquest, exclusion and cultural erasure. Christianity plainly influenced abolition, reform and community life. It also supplied justifications for slavery, Native American dispossession and exclusion of people of different sects and different religions. The correct historical response is to follow the evidence in each context. The report instead makes favorable treatment of Christianity part of the museum’s patriotic duty. It’s true that the Founders thought a lot about religion, but…
On Christmas day in 1813, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson on Hindu religion:
“Where is to be found Theology more orthodox or Phylosophy more profound than in the Introduction to the Shasta [Shastras]?”
National Archives, Founders Online, From John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 25 December 1813
In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson recalls that in drafting Virginia’s religious freedom law, legislators proposed inserting “Jesus Christ” into the preamble, making its theological language explicitly Christian. Jefferson says this was rejected:
“The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”
Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, written beginning January 6, 1821, Yale Law School, Avalon Project
“Americanism” as cultural gatekeeping
John Trumbull (1756-1843), Portrait of Alexander Hamilton, 1792, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, public domain
The report is especially disturbed by exhibitions that show there is no single American culture, language or narrative. That objection exposes its ultimate demand – for a state-preferred cultural narrative in which plural histories are acceptable only when they are positive.
Finally, it imports current White House policy positions into the definition of historical truth. Programs are condemned for using “undocumented immigrant” rather than “illegal alien,” discussing gender identity, criticizing restrictions on abortion, or addressing gun violence.
Excising controversial ideas is not good historical process. The report fails to recognize its own absurdity when it condemns the Smithsonian for politicization while demanding that museum interpretation conform to the current administration’s positions on immigration, sexuality, reproduction, firearms and DEI.
How the Smithsonian’s hybrid status is being weaponized
The Preamble and 1st Article of the Constitution of the United States, Constitutional Convention, 17 September 1787, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), public domain.
The Smithsonian’s unusual hybrid status provides the Institution with some insulation but also opens it up to political exposure that the White House wishes to take advantage of. The White House’s strategy is to force Secretary Bunch and the Board to become the administration’s internal enforcement mechanism. The Smithsonian receives more than half of its resources through federal appropriations that support its staff, buildings, security, and basic operations. Even when a particular exhibition is privately supported, the museum containing it depends on its publicly financed infrastructure.
The Congressional Research Service concluded that most actions contemplated by the President’s March 2025 executive order do not rest in the Vice President’s power as a single regent, that curatorial changes belong to the 17-member Board of Regents as a whole and that restrictions on appropriated funds require congressional action. Congress kept Smithsonian funding near $1 billion in the last cycle and did not adopt the ideological riders sought by the White House.
That does not make the White House’s campaign against the Smithsonian harmless. An institution facing a hostile White House, budget reductions, Board vacancies and public accusations of anti-Americanism may censor itself long before a court determines where executive authority ends.
Second page of the Constitution of the United States, Constitutional Convention, 17 September 1787, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), public domain.
The White House wants the National Museum of American History to establish a major, visible account of the Founding and Revolution, with substantially expanded treatment of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, the Continental Congress, the Declaration, the Constitution and iconic Revolutionary episodes – without acknowledgement of the complexity of the figures involved or the ideas contested at the time. The museum will be expected to restore or enlarge patriotic observances, including Independence Day, Flag Day and ceremonies associated with the Star-Spangled Banner. The report treats the absence of these programs as evidence of institutional hostility, so their restoration is an obvious compliance measure.
It wants language about restorative history, decolonization, racism, and social justice to be removed or heavily diluted. References to undocumented people, transgender identities, nonbinary gender, reproductive rights, gun activism or systemic inequality will be removed or recontextualized. Content describing the country as founded through conquest or dispossession will likely be rewritten to emphasize national ideals and later progress. Material about racial hierarchy and immigration exclusion will have to end on a high note!
Leadership changes are likely. Hartig is the clearest immediate mark, but Smithsonian Secretary Bunch is the larger target, because he is the Smithsonian Institution’s chief and most prominent protector. The report does not formally demand either person’s removal and the President cannot directly fire them. But a Board instruction to “restore confidence,” a congressional hearing, or a funding confrontation could be used to force one or both out.
The review will also expand beyond American History. NMAH is the test case, not the outer boundary.
What could the consequences be?
Article V through VII of the Constitution of the United States, Constitutional Convention, 17 September 1787, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), public domain.
The first consequence is to encourage self-censorship. Curators will learn that a sentence, guest speaker, object choice or old conference remark can be isolated in a White House dossier and treated as evidence of disloyalty. Commemoration will be substituted for history. History asks what happened, why it happened, who benefited, who suffered and how we know. Historians, scientists, artists, donors and lenders may decline to work with an institution whose content can be revised by political officials.
The White House report does not defend facts. It sets forth an officially approved ideology and calls it “objective history.” What is being contested is whether the national past belongs to historians, evidence and public argument—or whether “American history” will mean the story a president requires federal institutions to tell.
