The White House Wants to Make the Smithsonian a Pariah

A renewed threat underscores the museum complex’s isolation—and the limits of Trump’s pressure campaign.Caroline Gutman for The AtlanticSeptember 2, 2026, 10:30 AM ET The Trump administration’s latest strategy to control the Smithsonian has the logic of lunchroom bullying; the Department of Interior is channeling “you can’t sit with us” energy as it tries to make the world’s largest museum complex a pariah in Washington.In a newly public August 28 letter from the department to the Smithsonian board of regents, Trump-administration officials write that executive departments and agencies “cannot in good conscience continue to support the Smithsonian under current leadership” and suggest that they cease cooperation with the Smithsonian on routine logistical matters, such as loaning items for exhibits and awarding discretionary grants. The letter was sent just days before the regents, having failed to secure an open site on the National Mall for the Smithsonian’s newest museums, resorted to placing the National Museum of the American Latino in a largely vacant building it already owns. In doing so, the Smithsonian dodged Congress, a move that reflects the inward turn of an institution on the outs.Such developments illustrate the growing alienation the Smithsonian faces in the capital and difficulties that go deeper than the superficial signage Donald Trump wants placed in front of one of its museums to discredit it. For the past year and a half, the White House has repeatedly threatened the institution, but recently, more parties have joined the effort—first Republicans in Congress who in two hearings scrutinized the National Museum of American History over supposed partisan bias, and now the Interior Department, which has no official oversight of the Smithsonian. Although partially government-funded, the Smithsonian is independent of the executive branch—the White House has essentially no say over what it does—and it was designed to be as such. Still, it’s becoming clear that functioning freely in this charged climate might also mean going it alone.Invoking the White House’s recent report on the Museum of American History, the Interior letter accuses the Smithsonian of potentially violating federal antidiscrimination laws—a common way, on the right, of criticizing DEI programs, especially those created in response to the racial-justice protests of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Signed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy Vince Haley, the letter also requests a meeting with the board of regents, the entity that actually oversees the institution. The regents’ membership has been shrinking this year as members’ terms have ended and their positions have gone unfilled, reportedly due to administration pressure.Despite the language in the letter, a White House official told me by email that the Interior Department did not mean that agencies shouldn’t cooperate with the Smithsonian; rather, those agencies will “find it difficult to cooperate with current Smithsonian leadership in light of the disturbing evidence that has been uncovered.” The official also said it’s up to the Justice Department to determine whether the Smithsonian violated antidiscrimination laws and not to conflate “evidence of unlawful discrimination with a direct allegation that it happened.”In the letter, the Interior Department writes that institution leadership has embraced “radical ideology” that serves to “weaken our shared American identity” and “erase our heritage.” The rhetoric is particularly striking coming from the department at the center of contested efforts to take down wall texts at National Park sites across the country, where information on slavery, climate change, Native Americans, and other topics has been removed over the past year. The National Park Service represents a discomfiting alternate reality for the Smithsonian—one in which exhibits have been subject to political approval.Read: The Smithsonian’s show trial on Capitol HillThe White House is surely pleased with such changes at the National Park sites, which Trump called for in the same March 2025 executive order that kicked off the administration’s campaign against the Smithsonian. It seems to want to extend that kind of control to the museums on the National Mall, which Trump has asserted are too negative and focus too much on “how bad slavery was.” But with a president-proof system standing in officials’ way, they’ve had to seek out additional levers of pressure against Smithsonian leadership.The Interior letter represents the department’s most comprehensive public statement on the Smithsonian after the White House tapped it in July to place signs on National Park Service–controlled land outside the National Museum of American History, which will detail its alleged political biases and direct would-be visitors to what the administration describes as more accurate information. Much of this effort is about framing U.S. history in a more positive light, which the Smithsonian says it already does while also dealing with that history’s complexities.These partisan feuds are especially familiar to the Museum of the American Latino, which was subject to politicized scrutiny long before Trump started taking on the wider institution. Foreshadowing present criticisms, a 2022 Heritage Foundation op-ed described one of the museum’s early shows as a disgrace with an “unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history, religion and economics.” Writers for the right-wing think tank asserted that the museum should be defunded, a call one of them repeated this summer (and he threw in the Women’s History Museum for good measure).The Museum of the American Latino’s placement in the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building will surely disappoint some: No starchitect to deliver a glossy new design. No bespoke architecture, like the Museum of the American Indian’s sinuous facade or the Museum of African American History and Culture’s Yoruba-crown-inspired exterior. It might make for a quieter debut. Then again, the World’s Fair–style building is arguably the loudest, most colorful structure on the National Mall. It certainly won’t look like a museum that anyone is trying to hide.