Of the 21 museums under the umbrella of the Smithsonian Institution, one in particular seems recently to have rubbed President Donald Trump the wrong way.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL,” Trump fulminated in a social media post Tuesday, “where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
Mercy me. Imagine that! A museum dedicated to African American history and culture that dares to include some exhibits about slavery.
If you haven’t seen the real thing — and I have been back with friends and relatives more times than I have kept count — the experience is nowhere near as gloomy as the president recollects. They even have Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac Eldorado on display, speaking of “success” and “brightness.”
Well, hard as this may be to believe, the president’s description of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture falls woefully short of accuracy — especially in comparison to his remarks at the museum’s opening in 2017.
“I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage,” he said, “especially when it comes to faith, culture and the unbreakable American spirit …”
”And it really is very, very special. It’s something that, frankly, if you want to know the truth, it’s doing so well that everybody is talking about it.”
Ah, what a difference eight years makes!
The president’s recent comments came a week after the White House sent an ominous announcement to the Smithsonian: Its museums would be required to revise any content that the administration finds problematic in “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals” — and they have 120 days to do so.
Black Americans are not the only folks whose depictions are receiving special scrutiny. For example, a painting of refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border that was a finalist in a contest at the National Portrait Gallery, another Smithsonian-affiliated museum, was singled out for denunciation.
“Refugees Crossing the Border Wall Into South Texas,” a 2022 work by painter Rigoberto A. Gonzalez, shows a family in flight from some unseen peril, scaling a wooden ladder at what appears to be Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” at the U.S.-Mexico border.
It may be art to you or, at least, to me. But to the art critics who staff the “Official White House Rapid Response account” on X, this was nothing more than “the perfect example of what President Trump means when he says the Smithsonian is ‘OUT OF CONTROL.’”
Art, like history, must never stir troubling thoughts or any critical impulses in our heads. To go back to Trump’s original condemnatory post on Truth Social: “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.”
It’s not just our national museums that are “out of control.“ Those were the words Trump used to describe crime on the streets of Washington, D.C., to justify ordering the district’s National Guard to police the nation’s capital, subsequently joined by guardsmen from Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia, all of which have Republican governors.
Some of my local media colleagues soon discovered that many members of the guard came from cities that happened to have higher crime rates than the district, where officials and media have been reporting a three-year decline in violent crimes.
Some members of Team Trump accused the city of reporting “rigged” numbers, much like the president attributed recent reports of weakness in the job market to “rigged” data, and then fired the Senate-confirmed Bureau of Labor Statistics official responsible for computing those numbers each month.
Washington, Trump claimed in an announcement on Aug. 7, was on the brink of “complete and total lawlessness.”
But, from my vantage point, the streets were notably quiet, if you look past the unusually high number of Humvees and guardsmen, resembling an authoritarian takeover.
Fortunately, the resemblance to a police state has not been totally debilitating. If you can stand the seasonal heat, I still recommend the city to tourists, especially the great museums.
Even Trump has declared the city to be “safe again.”
Email Clarence Page at cptimee@gmail.com.
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