August 20, 2025
The alarms are blaring, but too many Americans are still asleep. Donald Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian is not just another crude outburst. It is an authoritarian strike against the very idea of truth in America. When the President of the United States demands that our national museums stop talking about slavery and start telling a sunnier story, he is not engaging in debate—he is laying the groundwork for censorship, indoctrination, and dictatorship.
Make no mistake: this is a war on memory. And wars on memory always precede wars on people.
The Strongman’s Script
Trump’s complaint is chilling in its simplicity: the Smithsonian talks “too much” about how bad slavery was, and not enough about “success” and “brightness.”
This is the oldest trick in the tyrant’s book. When you can’t face the sins of the past, you erase them. When you erase them, you make it easier to repeat them.
From Stalin’s vanished photographs to Putin’s “patriotic history” classes, strongmen have always known that if you control the story of yesterday, you control the possibilities of tomorrow. Trump’s demand for a White House review of Smithsonian exhibits—with a 120-day ultimatum to sanitize them—puts him in their company. He is not preserving history. He is weaponizing it.
This Is Not a Drill
We need to stop treating these attacks as outbursts to be mocked. They are blueprints.
Trump has already demanded “patriotic education” in schools. Now he’s going after the nation’s greatest museum network. Tomorrow it will be textbooks. Then libraries. Then journalists. The line between a democracy and an authoritarian state is drawn in the control of truth. And Trump is erasing that line, fast.
To the complacent, this may sound exaggerated. But authoritarianism never arrives all at once. It creeps, it chips away, it normalizes. First the Smithsonian, then the classroom, then the newsroom—until the only “truth” left is what the Dear Leader decrees. By the time you notice, it is too late.
History Belongs to the People, Not the President
The Smithsonian is not Trump’s property. It is the people’s museum—funded by us, curated for us, preserving our full story for us.
It tells of Edison and Ellington, Armstrong and Apollo, but it also tells of chains, whips, and Jim Crow. That is not “anti-American.” That is America. To demand brightness without darkness is to demand lies.
And lies are the seedbed of tyranny.
The Line in the Sand
This is the moment when Americans must decide whether truth still matters.
If Trump can dictate how the Smithsonian tells our history, then history itself becomes another branch of his political machine. If we allow that, democracy is already on life support.
The fight for the Smithsonian is the fight for America’s memory. And if we lose our memory, we lose everything.
Do not shrug this off as another Trump sideshow. This is the main event. This is how freedom dies—not with a bang, but with the quiet rewriting of plaques on museum walls.
The time to resist is now.