Trump Smithsonian review point person: Placards written in ‘ideological fashion’
A White House adviser who is leading President Trump’s review of content at the Smithsonian Institution’s museums in Washington defended the move as shifting the focus to progress, rather than dwelling on past mistakes.
“The fact our country was involved in slavery is awful — no one thinks otherwise,” Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president, told Fox News in an interview Wednesday. “But what I saw when I was going through the museum, personally, was an overemphasis on slavery, and I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery.”
“There’s a lot of history to our country, both positive and negative, but we need to keep moving forward. We can’t just keep focusing on the negative — all that does is divide us,” she added.
Trump launched a review of the Smithsonian museums’ content last week and complained in a social media post Tuesday that the museums had become too focused on negative aspects of the country’s history, including about slavery.
“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,'” the president wrote on Truth Social. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, 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.”
“We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums,” he added.
The move spawned backlash from critics, who argued the president was trying to whitewash troubled aspects of the nation’s past. It also marked a departure from Trump’s public position on the Smithsonian’s role less than a decade ago when he praised the then-newly opened National Museum of African American History.
“It’s a new, beautiful Smithsonian museum that serves as a shining example of African Americans’ incredible contributions to our culture, our society and our history,” he said during his first presidential term.
Halligan said the museums should be geared toward pride in America’s growth.
“Like just about every other country in the world, the United States has a checkered past,” she said. “We should be able to take our kids, our students through the Smithsonian and be proud when we leave.”