In modern American life, warning labels are quite common. We see them on all sorts of everyday items, from medications to machines to household chemicals, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that: These labels let the public know about potential hazards that people would be wise to avoid.

We do not, however, expect to see government-imposed warning labels on museums.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump signed an executive order in July ordering the placement of temporary “warning” signs near the entrance of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, telling visitors that because of “inaccurate information presented in the Museum,” they should seek “accurate information” elsewhere.

As MS NOW noted at the time, the radical and unprecedented move marked a “major escalation” in the president’s campaign “to pressure the Smithsonian Institution to rewrite American history to better align with his administration’s ideology.”

That campaign is ongoing. The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables reported this week:

The Trump administration is currently preparing temporary signs that will accuse the National Museum of American History of ideological bias, according to a letter I obtained sent by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The September 3 letter, which Burgum sent to Senator Jeff Merkley, says that the National Park Service is planning to add about a dozen signs outside the museum at an estimated cost of $84,000.

“This is another step in a well-planned pressure campaign by the Trump Administration to undermine the integrity and independence of the Smithsonian Institution,” Merkley said in a statement, adding that he would work to protect that independence.

By any fair measure, Trump’s second term has been challenging for the Smithsonian. Just two months after the Republican president returned to the White House, he signed an executive order that directly took aim at the Smithsonian and its museums, directing officials to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American” ideology from the institution.

The same order accused the Biden administration of using the Smithsonian to advance what Trump described as a “corrosive” ideology, among other things.

All of this was ridiculous, but it was merely the first in a series of steps, culminating in an announcement last summer that the White House would conduct a “far-reaching review” of Smithsonian exhibitions, materials and operations.

Polling showed that Americans, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, wanted the administration to leave the Smithsonian alone, but Team Trump proceeded anyway and unveiled a 162-page report a few months ago that accused the National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism.”

The document was plainly indefensible. A column in The Washington Post, for example, described the White House’s report as a “relentlessly tendentious piece of trash.” The New Republic published a related fact-check that characterized Team Trump’s findings as a “dud.”

MS NOW’s Hayes Brown summarized, “The conclusion I must draw is that these White House authors don’t want history on display at the American history museum. Instead, they want a temple to an idealized, sanitized version of America. The White House has become a real-life Tumblr page devoted to a toxic fandom.”

The Organization of American Historians, the nation’s largest group of scholars of U.S. history, also condemned the White House’s screed, accusing the Republican administration of trying to “erase the conflict, struggle and diversity — the complexity — that have always defined the American experience.”

The pushback was heartening. It was also discarded by the president and his team, whose crusade to bring the Smithsonian to heel continues apace.

In a recent column for The New York Times, M. Gessen wrote: “‘We live in a country with an unpredictable past.’ This was a saying among the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union when I was growing up. We never knew which part of our history would be obliterated next. Now Americans, too, live in a country with an unpredictable past.”

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Team Trump eyes new taxpayer-financed warning labels for the Smithsonian appeared first on MS NOW.

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