Trump claims that the institution has fallen into the hands of Marxist radicals. A stroll through the exhibitions suggests otherwise.August 20, 2026The Immokalee Statue of Liberty in “Many Voices, One Nation,” at the National Museum of American History.Photograph by Lawren SimmonsEarlier 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.