Trump Orders Warning Signs Outside Smithsonian, Escalating Fight Over American History
The president wants visitors greeted at the door by notices disputing the museum's own exhibits
By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
President Trump has taken his dispute with the Smithsonian Institution outside the building.
The president ordered federal officials to install signs outside the National Museum of American History warning visitors that some of the exhibits inside contain what he calls "inaccurate" information, according to CBS News and NBC News. Both outlets report the move is the latest step in Trump's continuing effort to influence how the Smithsonian's museums present American history — an effort that has so far focused on pressuring the institution's exhibits from within.
Neither report specifies which exhibits the administration considers inaccurate, nor whether Smithsonian leadership — which operates with a degree of independence from the executive branch, funded jointly by federal appropriations and private trust funds — was consulted before the order or intends to comply, contest, or ignore it.
The Smithsonian is not a standard executive agency; it answers to a Board of Regents that includes members of Congress, the Chief Justice, and private citizens, precisely to insulate its scholarship from the politics of any given administration. A president ordering signage on federal grounds disputing a Smithsonian museum's own content tests that arrangement in a way that has few clean precedents.
What the signs will say, who will write them, and whether the museum's own historians get a say — none of that is yet public. This desk will follow the language of the actual signage once it goes up, since that language, not the announcement, will tell the real story.
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by CBS News and NBC News.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."