In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” aimed at rooting out “corrosive ideology” in the Smithsonian institutions and other federal sites of memory and history. The order accuses sites like the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which has extensive exhibits on slavery and segregation, of making a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” in a way that “deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.” A few months later, Trump ordered a comprehensive review of eight Smithsonian museums, complaining on Truth Social that the Smithsonian focuses too much on “how bad Slavery was” and calling museums “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’”
These declarations are part of the Trump administration’s larger project of eliminating efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which has included banning books and revising curricula, canceling federal funding for institutions and projects touching on related topics, scrubbing websites of content related to DEI, and shuttering offices and agencies. While intended to wrest total control over institutions, agencies and whole sectors of society in the present, this work is also aimed at whitewashing history and the administration is framing its revisionist efforts in terms of “truth.”
Though the March executive order was met with shock among many museums and memory scholars, it should not have come as a surprise. The US has always had a fraught relationship to historical memory of slavery. For much of the nation’s history, the horrors of slavery were subsumed by the Lost Cause narrative that reframed slavery as a benevolent institution and claimed the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. The nation’s museums and historical sites largely ignored the history of slavery, instead presenting narratives of racial progress, if they addressed African American history at all.
However, in the last decade we have witnessed what Jeff Olick and others have referred to as a “mnemonic turn” toward a more critical history and memory of slavery: Confederate monuments were toppled, universities began to confront their ties to slavery, the 1619 Project upended the founding myth of the US, BLM protests swept the globe demanding racial justice, and several new museums opened in the US, including the NMAAHC, that tell a more critical history of slavery by centering it in American history and connecting the past violence of slavery to contemporary racial injustice.
These new museums also make truth-telling central to their work, as is exemplified by the NMAAHC’s mission to “capture and share the unvarnished truth of African American history and culture” (emphasis in original). It presents this truth in extensive, painstakingly researched historical exhibitions created under the guidance of a first-rate scholarly advisory committee, chaired by John Hope Franklin, and a veritable army of historians. The museum’s founding director, Lonnie Bunch, intended the historical exhibition to “demonstrate through its interpretive frameworks that issues of race shaped all aspects of American life”; but it could only do this if, as former sharecropper Princy Jenkins told Bunch, the museum helped “America remember not just what it wants to recall but what it needs to remember.”
Truth-telling has been a pillar of efforts to atone for past violence, particularly in transitional justice theory and practice. For example, a 2006 United Nations study on the “right to truth” found that it is “an inalienable and autonomous right, linked to the duty and obligation of the State to protect and guarantee human rights, to conduct effective investigations and to guarantee effective remedy and reparations.” As moral philosopher Margaret Urban Walker argues, “Truth telling puts important and previously hidden or undiscovered evidence and testimony into circulation and at the disposal of victims, parties responsible for wrongs or their repair, and their societies.” Through the “unvarnished” history of slavery presented in museums like the NMAAHC, the story of slavery that was so long silenced in the US commemorative landscape enters into circulation, and with it suggestions of implication and responsibility for past and present racial injustice.
It is precisely the circulation of factual truths presented in institutions like the NMAAHC that the Trump administration is vehemently fighting against in its efforts to construct its own, alternative “truth” about American history. Foucault (2001) argued that “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth — that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true.” When factual truth does not comport with the image of past and present the regime wishes to uphold, the Trump administration is instead pressuring institutions of history and memory to present “alternative facts”; in this case whitewashing history to tell a specious story of America’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.” As Hannah Arendt, writing in the New Yorker in 1967, reminded us “Unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies.”
By coopting – and turning on its head – the very notion of truth, the Trump administration is seeking to undermine the critical (factual) truth-telling work these institutions are trying to engage in. The NMAAHC and museums like it represent a threat to Trump’s efforts to construct his own regime of truth; as Foucault also writes in the same chapter: “it’s not a matter of a battle ‘on behalf’ of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays.” Trump does not simply want to control the narrative of public history; he wants to control truth itself. A key pillar of Trump’s populism, as Gunn Enli puts it, is his claim to a special relationship to a “more ‘real’ version of the truth” (Enli 2025) and his efforts to control historical memory echo Stuart Hall’s claim (following Foucault) that “Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of ‘the truth’ but has the power to make itself true.” Trump is asserting his power in the effort to make true a whitewashed and revisionist US history as a foundation for his regime’s unapologetic white supremacy.
However, this attack on museums also points toward their power in presenting and circulating the “unvarnished truth” about the past. In his late-night social media rants and oddly capitalized executive orders, Trump and his administration reveal not only their fear of the truth, but especially its circulation in public institutions of history and memory. And perhaps they should be afraid; as the administration restricts what books can be read and what history can be taught, museums become ever more important educational spaces. They are also popular – even ruby red states like Texas and Florida are funneling money toward museums of African American history and memory in the effort to attract tourism revenue.
It is not clear yet what Trump’s efforts at whitewashing will mean for the NMAAHC and other federal institutions, but the battle over the truth about the past is yet another way the administration is lurching toward authoritarianism. Also in “Truth and Politics,” Hannah Arendt worried about precisely this relationship of truth and authoritarianism, wondering “what kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm.” Yet Trump’s attacks on museums remind us precisely of the power of truth in museums and sites of memory and history. It may not be as easy to whitewash the past as the administration hopes, for the truth about the past is already in circulation. James Baldwin reminds us of this, in words that adorn the wall of the NMAAHC: “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it… history is literally present in all that we do.”
